first reformed kiss
The credits that follow aren’t silent – Lustmord’s rumbling ambient score kicks in – but they’re quiet enough to serve the audience’s immediate need to process the eccentricity of what just happened.
Schrader has described this development as Toller’s catching Michael’s “virus,” “the virus of suicidal glory.” This makes it seem as though Toller were wholly passive, transformed through sheer proximity. Reading from diary entries, Toller delivers his narration in the dispassionate style of Country Priest’s protagonist (Claude Laydu) rather than, say, the self-indulgent tones of Bridget Jones.
As their breath slowly syncs, both float off the floor. Michael’s eco-related despair is grim indeed—so grim that he plans to make himself a martyr for the cause. In our own interview with Schrader, the director describes this as “the delayed cut”, and also explains how the movie’s aversion to splitting shots up means audiences are forced to edit scenes with their own eyes. (Toller is currently unmarried, and it’s hinted that his son’s devastating death may have ended his marriage, too.) Donate $2500 to support LARB’s public events series, increasing community access to our ongoing literary conversation, and, along with all the perks listed above, we’ll gift you two VIP tickets to an event. From here, everything moves very quickly. In the film’s first dialogue, Toller turns down an offer of help; he winces as he smiles to colleagues; his home is barren, and every conversation is a struggle, since joy and comfort and company would confirm the reality, perhaps also the attractiveness, of precisely what he is desperate to exercise right out of existence.
For both Ida and Schrader’s movie, the result is a visual format that mimics the metaphorical smallness of their protagonists’ lives, and one that imparts a sense of claustrophobia on their viewers: with reference to the strict confines of First Reformed’s images, the camera’s height and angle often make it feel like it’s intruding, especially during close-ups and a scene set in a doctor’s office. Interrupting Toller’s regimen of confession and banal church maintenance (the women’s bathroom is leaking), Mary (Amanda Seyfried) knocks on the reverend’s door.
FIRST REFORMED BEGINS with an exercise: Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) writes in his diary and tells us in measured voice-over that he will keep this diary for one year — “in long hand,” censoring and removing nothing — at which point the diary will be destroyed.
When Mary comes to visit, he hurriedly hides the alcohol, tests his breath and tries to act as normally as he can.
Countless congregants have worshipped in its sanctuary, seeking absolution and solace and sometimes new life.
There is a lure to that life: Michael was passionate and committed; he cared about the earth; his life had a purpose; and he had Mary, whose company promises the domestic creaturely pleasures that Toller cannot even admit to wanting.
The Church, it’s implied, should not compromise its morals and values for the sake of political power or social expediency.
But then the saturated beauty gives way to a wasteland: tar sands and clear-cutting and masses of garbage. And isn’t it a little much to end a film as austere as this with a swirling Hollywood kiss? Michael’s problem is geologic, its scale is cosmic. Violent Content.
But the asceticism doesn’t end there; it’s consciously carried through in the film’s cinematography.
Edifying. After abandoning his decision to blow himself up at his church’s 250th anniversary ceremony, Toller replaces the vest he had donned with barbed wire, wrapping it tightly around his chest as he gasps at the sight of himself in the mirror.
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