★★★★½ - THE POST
- The Salt Path is a simple wee gem of a film -
Raynor Winn and her husband Moth invested their life savings in a friend's business. When that business failed in 2015 the Winns were naïve in the ways of courts and of bastards, and they lost everything they owned and more.
Homeless, and penniless except for a small weekly allowance, the Winns bought a cheap tent and a couple of sleeping bags and started to walk.
They lived near Minehead, in the southwest of England, close to the starting point of the South West Coast Path, which is a walking trail that winds for a thousand kilometres through towns, villages and along wildly beautiful cliff tops and shore lines.
The Winns had no real plans. Maybe they were just driven by a need to hang on to whatever remained of their mental health, and an elemental understanding that putting one foot in front of the other can help immensely with that.
Adding to the Winns’ challenges, Moth had a serious, degenerative neurological condition and wasn't expected to live for more than a handful of years.
As they walked, Raynor wrote and sketched in notebooks, which became a memoir and record of the walk. In 2018, Raynor's book The Salt Path was published. It was a bestseller, and has now been adapted as a film.
Script writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, Collette) and director Marianne Elliott don't stray far from the source material, but they also burrow deep below the surface of the story to find the heart and bones of the tale.
A good film-maker can talk for days about the difference between what happens in a film, and what it is actually about. I reckon Elliott and Lenkiewicz would have plenty to say on the subject.
Elliott is a veteran of British theatre - she is making her film directing debut here - and she brings a deep sense of the ways in which couples communicate under pressure, with the sodden and windblown confines of a tent on a hilltop making a fine metaphor for the strife that is besetting Raynor and Moth from all sides.
In the leads, Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are basically bloody perfect - with Anderson's accent only occasionally detouring around the isles and Isaacs revelling in playing someone other than a villain.
Behind the camera, the astonishing Hélène Louvart lets her lenses drink in the scenery - which is extraordinary - and also get close and skittish when the action demands it.
Louvart is an absolute legend of cinematography, with credits on films by Wim Wenders - Pina - and Agnès Varda - The Beaches of Agnes - on her CV. She also shot Never Rarely Sometimes Always for Eliza Hittman in 2020, which deserves a place on anyone's list of great-films-that-we-missed- because-of-Covid.
The 60-year-old Louvart wrapped The Salt Path last year and has completed another four feature films since.
The Salt Path is probably the best film I've seen so far this year. It is a simple story, well written and performed, and staged with some robust beauty.
This is a funny, loving, honest and unsentimental wee gem. Go and see it in a cinema.
- Graeme Tuckett, THE POST
The Salt Path is now playing at Light House Cinema!