pearyland

Imagine a wigged and beautified Englishman lying in a lavender field, who gets up and reads a reflection on the indifference that follows the lack of pleasure, gets nervous because he doesn't find the Alps ("Where are the Alps? I have to find them, these mountains of terror that can lead me to the sublime"), then calms down by drinking some tea that a servant prepares for him ("The English must have a good cup of tea"), with which he soon resumes his journey through the woods. Imagine that, after complaining about too many trees, while urinating against a trunk, the Englishman gets nervous at the sight of some ants walking on his foot and rails ("This is the problem with nature: it is so insistent"). We are in Provence during an unspecified summer of the eighteenth century. We are at the beginning of The Trouble with Nature.The film, presented in the Bright Future competition of the 49th edition of the Rotterdam Film Festival, tells a fictional episode in the life of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, who in 1757, at the age of nineteen, published the treatise "A philosophical investigation into the origin of our ideas of Sublime and Beautiful", with which, in full enlightenment, he laid the foundations of the future romantic aesthetic, mother of all subsequent aesthetics. Director Illum Jacobi imagines that, many years after the publication of the book that gave him fame, a Burke now in financial distress decides to go to the French Alps to experience that Sublime then deductively described only starting from Aristotelian thought, in order to rewrite his treatise giving it new life and new fame. On the one hand the frivolity of the man who demands tea and make-up even in conditions of greatest deprivation, the arrogance of the master towards the indigenous servant Awak (played by a resplendent Nathalia Acevedo) given to him by his brother, and the neurosis of the intellectual, masterfully expressed by the muttering interpretation of Antony Langdon (former Spacehog guitarist), they are made the subject of a ridicule that slides throughout the film, up to the amazing shot with which Jacobi reproduces Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer over the Sea of Fog, a romantic painting par excellence, with a Burkefrom behind again urinating on the Alpine ravines.