Where Fragments of Forgotten Peoples Dwell
ENYS MEN – a film by Mark Jenkin – (limited spoilers) ⁓
The Volunteer
Thought-provoking and beautiful, ENYS MEN is set in April, 1973 on a deserted island off the Cornish coast, where a lone Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) monitors the status of a rare flower. None of the characters is named, because the story isn’t about them; it’s about the island. Enys Men means “stone island” in Cornish. (In Welsh, it means “enemy man”.) The nearest islands to where it was filmed are the Isles of Scilly, which according to legend were once connected to Cornwall by the Kingdom of Lyonesse until it was swallowed by the sea in a single night.
The Girl (Flo Crowe)
The Volunteer communicates with the outside world via a battered Garex 2 radio, and has a Lisette 222 Transistor Radio for listening to music. She is reading “A Blueprint for Survival“, written by the editors of The Ecologist magazine, and the first paragraph of that book reads: “The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of someone born today is inevitable – unless it continues to be sustained for a while longer by an entrenched minority at the cost of imposing greater suffering on the rest of mankind.”
The Boatman (Edward Rowe)
Each day, on the way back to the ivy-covered house where she lives and keeps records of the plant’s progress, The Volunteer drops a pebble into the ventilation shaft of an abandoned mine. Judging from the time it takes for the stone to hit bottom, the shaft is between 200 and 250 meters deep. Some days the pebble strikes rock at the bottom. On other days it splashes into water. She does not record information about this activity.
The Volunteer’s generator is low on petrol and she is running out of tea. In the course of a fortnight, she will encounter seven children and seven Bal maidens. The box of Seven Maids Original Dried Skimmed Milk on her kitchen counter has three such maidens pictured on it, and a close up reveals that the maidens on the box have white beards.
On 29 April, the soil temperature has risen to 14.7 degrees and lichen appears on one of the flowers. On Mayday, the soil temperature has reached 14.9 degrees and lichen has spread to all the flowers. On the Second of May, the flowers are altogether gone.
The Preacher
The Volunteer visits a memorial plaque with the heading “Rag an seyth hwath a-woles” (in English “a week yet down below”) that lists seven names with no further description. Then she views another plaque which commemorates “the Senara lifeboat, lost with all hands on the first of May 1897 after going to the aid of the supply boat Govenek“.
The three events that follow that might not be in chronological order. The Volunteer finds a piece of wood with the middle part of “Govenek”) painted on it; The Boatman (Edward Rowe) delivers supplies to the island in a dinghy labelled “Govenek” (which means “hope” in Cornish); and seven men wearing cork floatation devices are seen through an open window of the house.
The Girl (Flo Crowe) is the right age to be The Volunteer’s daughter, but we see The Girl acquire The Volunteer’s abdominal scar, so both The Girl and The Baby (Loveday Twomlow) might be The Volunteer at earlier stages in her life.
Two of the seven May children who sing Kan Me (May Song in English). The song is Track 7 on Gwenno‘s 2022 album Tresor.
When the The Preacher (John Woodvine) christens the baby, a sign on the chapel wall behind him reads “Be Just and Fear Not“, which is the title of an 1863 poem by Henry Alford, and also part of a speech by Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. The Preacher sings “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning“, an 1873 hymn written by Phillip Bliss and based on a story of a shipwreck caused by the failure of a lighthouse.
Legend has it that Lyonesse’s Cathedral was built on what is now the Seven Stones Reef, 13 kilometers northwest of the Isles of Scilly. The Sevenstones Lightship has warned ships of the reef’s danger since 1841, so it could well have been the cause of a shipwreck in 1897. The number seven happens with inordinate frequency in this story.
Asked by Theo Smith of Massive about the moment in Enys Men where the film literally stops, director Jenkins explained: “It’s a freeze-frame that I added in the edit because there’s a splice in the film and you can see the splicing tape in-shot. I love seeing the materiality of film so I thought, ‘I’m gonna do that and see what it means later.’ People notice it, and have different theories about why it’s freeze-framed at that point. One of those theories will be right, but I still don’t know which one it is yet.”