‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ Teaser Trailer: Mona Fastvold Delivers Another Epic About an American Iconoclast
The last time screenwriters Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet collaborated, on the Corbet-directed “The Brutalist,” they created a bold American epic that garnered deserved critical praise and awards attention for its textured 70mm images (captured via VistaVision) and sweeping vision of 20th-century art, culture, and politics.
For their new film “The Testament of Ann Lee,” Fastvold steps back into the director’s chair to tell another story of, as IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote, “a European iconoclast who comes to America in order to build a new kind of church.” Watch the teaser trailer below.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” is an account of the rise of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), founder of the 18th-century religious sect known as the Shakers. A fervent proponent of celibacy, Lee was also an activist for gender equality — and a utopian leader who believed herself to be the female incarnation of Christ.
Fastvold’s film tells Lee’s story — one which, like the tale of László Tóth in “The Brutalist,” works beautifully as an allegory for the struggles and passions of a 21st-century filmmaker — as an audaciously conceived musical, using over a dozen original Shaker hymns as the basis for spiritually inflected expressions of agony and ecstasy choreographed by Fastvold and Corbet’s “Vox Lux” collaborator Celia Rowlson-Hall.
Shooting on 35mm with an eye toward 70mm blow-ups for the film’s theatrical release, cinematographer William Rexer creates a sumptuous candlelit look for the film reminiscent of Caravaggio’s paintings and atmospheric period pieces like Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” and Ridley Scott’s “The Duellists.” Like “The Duellists,” “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a sweeping epic made with limited resources — working with a budget comparable to that of “The Brutalist” (reportedly around $10 million), Fastvold and production designer Samuel Bader have crafted a film of astonishing scale and detail.
In his review of the film out of the Venice Film Festival, Ehrlich called “The Testament of Ann Lee” a “speculative, feverish, and altogether rapturous biopic” that works as “a celebration of — and then in its less rhapsodic second half, a plea for — the conditions required to make a movie like ‘The Testament of Ann Lee.’ Just as Ann Lee’s upbeat message appealed to a Christian population that had grown tired of being promised salvation through suffering, Fastvold and Corbet’s model offers a more actionable response to an industry sick of Hollywood doomsayers.”
Watch the trailer below.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” opens in theaters on December 25 from Searchlight Pictures.
