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How Amanda Seyfried missed out on an Oscar nomination for her extraordinary performance in The Testament of Ann Lee is one of life’s puzzles, although it may well have something to do with her refusal to apologise for calling the late Charlie Kirk “hateful”, as has been suggested. Or it might simply be the sheer weirdness of the film itself, which tells the story of the founder of the Shakers – the very same Shakers famous for making ladder-back chairs – partly through the songs and convulsive dances that gave them their name.
“I confess I didn’t know exactly what to make of it, but I knew I had been through a singular experience,” wrote one critic as a preamble to an interview with Seyfried and the director, Mona Fastvold. They were both very pleased with that reaction. Seyfried thought it might have been a mistake to see it alone. “It’s best to process it with someone else,” she told him. It’s the kind of concerned observation that Ann Lee herself might have made, had she lived in a time of therapy.
Mona Fastvold is best known as the co-writer of The Brutalist with Brady Corbet, her life partner and constant collaborator. The two directors write all their scripts together, produce their films as a team and direct second unit for each other, but this was always Fastvold’s project.
She came across Ann Lee when she was researching The World to Come, a lesbian love story set in 1856. Looking into the stolid culture these women would have inherited, she came across the story of the Shaker communities established across New England. Ann Lee had brought a handful of her followers from Manchester in 1774, seeking to build a utopia of ecstatic worship and hard work.
Fastvold is Norwegian. “I had no concept of Mother Ann Lee,” she says. “So when I read about her, I thought maybe this is something all Americans know, that is taught in school.” As she saw it, Ann Lee was America’s first feminist. “Then it turned out that nobody knew about her. She was about to be completely erased.” There are only three practising Shakers left, she says. “But a beautiful chair can’t be all that’s left of Mother Ann Lee. What she set out to do was quite extraordinary. She was complicated, yes, and far from perfect, but definitely worth examining.”
Central to Ann Lee’s teaching and preaching was a belief in equality. There would be no more distinctions of class, race or gender among Shakers. Young, working-class and illiterate, Lee cast herself as mother to the community. For her followers, she was the Second Coming of Christ. At one point, the community numbered about 6000 – remarkable, given that celibacy was fundamental to the Shaker way of life.
“No one can love God while following the lust of the flesh,” Lee tells her husband and father of their four children, all of whom died in infancy. Unfortunately, his lusts are not so easily quieted.
Lee interested Fastvold personally as a matriarch, a leader who saw herself as creating a space for her disciples, cocooning them in love. As an artist, Fastvold was also inspired by the cinematic potential of the Shakers’ songs – which, in the early days, consisted of grunts and growls or improvised lyrics in tongues – and their frenzied dances. “It had to be a musical because that’s how they worshipped,” says Fastvold. “But it had to be a different kind of musical, grounded in their reality.”
Conventional musicals alternate dialogue scenes with musical breaks, she observes. They’re also comedies. “That just wouldn’t work for this story. It had to be that every movement and musical piece in the film was grounded in devotion.” Composer Daniel Blumberg, who won both a BAFTA and an Oscar for his score for The Brutalist, sifted through about a thousand Shaker hymns that were preserved as sheet music.
“He took them and elevated them; he did such beautiful work on them, but he wanted to stay true to their music.” For the earlier, improvised songs, he and Fastvold invited improvisational singers to work with the cast. “Because it needs to be done with intent. You can’t just make a bunch of sounds because it’s coming from a place of prayer and worship, and there is a story and a journey to that improvisation. We wanted to teach the actors that method so they could improvise themselves.”
The early dances were based on contemporary accounts of religious raves so loud that neighbours would call the Manchester authorities to break them up. “There was a lot of description of them, how they would dance and move and stomp, how they would hit their bodies and lift their hands in the air, so there’s that to go on,” says Fastvold. “Later, when they are in America, and it all becomes more structured and symmetrical, I based it on drawings and paintings of these beautiful circular formations.”
The complex circle dances were choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall. “It’s so technical: the choreography, the live singing, the Manchester accent,” Seyfried told Indiewire. “There was a lot of repetitive movement, using my body in a way that I’ve never done before. It becomes this full-bodied expression of your devotion. I was this vessel. It was exciting and scary and f---ing great!”
All that dancing, says Fastvold, replaced the sex they agreed to reject. “They would dance for hours until they were drenched in sweat and collapsed. And they would hold each other and say ‘more love!’. I wanted it to be orgasmic in those sequences, to have a release there.”
Sometimes, Fastvold agrees, they all look mad. You’re certainly allowed to laugh. “I’m not religious. I was raised in a secular household. I’m not preaching her gospel, that is for sure,” she says. “I definitely wanted to stay close to her, empathise with her and understand her journey in that time and place, which came from a place of seeking healing and relief.” She sees modern parallels in yoga or running: anything people do to shake out trauma. “But I am in dialogue with it, too. I’m aware of how insane it is, but I’m excited to take you on a journey where you oscillate between the two (reactions).”
Inevitably, she says, the projects she develops with Brady Corbet bleed into each other, no matter which of them initiates and then directs it. “I think when we were writing The Testament of Ann Lee after The Brutalist, we thought we were doing something completely different. It was a different time period; it was a female character, a feminist character, and there are a lot of themes around male ego.”
Later, however, they were promoting The Brutalist by day, and she was editing Ann Lee at night. “And all of a sudden, I definitely started seeing how they were speaking to each other and that the themes were similar.
“Both are about people who are trying to do something impossible, whether it is to erect a building that nobody understands or creating a community with radical ideas,” Fastvold says. “There was also a link with our own impossible projects. No one wanted this movie, but we made it all the same.” It then toured the festival circuit, starting in competition in Venice. This week, it screens as a special gala at the film festival in Berlin. “And no one wanted The Brutalist, but we made it and, once it was made, there was an appetite for it.” All it took was an act of belief.
The Testament of Ann Lee is in cinemas from February 26.
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