This Blessed Plot: Marc Isaacs tackles grief, madness, betrayal and England’s ghosts in a mischievous docudrama

Marc Isaacs’ last film, The Filmmaker’s House (2020), focused on himself as master of a circus of neighbours, contractors and a homeless local man during the pandemic. With This Blessed Plot, he escapes from London up the M11 and the B1256, and into the mists of olde Eng- land. He stays out of the picture, though the presence of a younger outsider filmmaker, Lori, who is Chinese, searching for a subject and for her filmmaking self, only emphasises his off-screen direction.

To Thaxted in Essex we go. Lori takes a room with widow Maggie, who gives a tour of the parish church (an exemplar of English Perpendicular Gothic). Here she hears from the film’s narrator, the church’s late Christian Socialist vicar, Conrad Noel, dead 80 years. In the cemetery she also meets local man Keith – Isaacs’ fence-builder in The Filmmaker’s House – who is composing the inscription for his late wife’s tombstone: he is thinking “Loyal, loving and true”. Then he breaks out in an effusive speech hymning the praises of England. (The words, which give the film its title, are John of Gaunt’s death- bed speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II, though shorn of Gaunt’s lament that the country has now been sold on the cheap.)

‘Plot’ perhaps does double duty here. In The Filmmaker’s House, Isaacs’ producer told him buyers now only want documentaries about sex, death or crime. This Blessed Plot delivers all that, with a subtle wink, but is otherwise defiantly artisanal: unpolished field sound, staccato editing, uncertain non-professional performances. Shortly after Keith has shown Lori his shed shrine of Arsenal memorabilia (her deadpan response to Keith’s framing of Aaron Ramsey’s unwashed FA Cup Final shorts is delicious), he receives a visit from ‘Uncle’, fresh from prison. Lori meets the ghost of Keith’s widow, Sue, who wants him to know that “Loyal, loving and true” may not be her most apt epitaph. And the debt collectors are on to Keith…

Grief, betrayal, madness, a dead narrator… Isaacs may not have pitched his film as the Sunset Blvd. (1950) of provincial Essex, but he goes long on the ghosts of English heritage and culture in what’s billed as a ‘Documentary Fiction Film Pageant’. He folds in Noel’s friend and neighbour Gustav Holst and his music; archive clips from the Boulting brothers’ local harvest documentary Ripe Earth (1938) and Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales (1972), shot at the windmill – and Noel’s Thaxted Morris Men, the oldest revival side in the country. All this and, perhaps most unexpected, an a cappella graveside rendition of Tim Hardin’s ‘Reason to Believe’ – a song of retrospection and defiant reclamation. 

 ► This Blessed Plot is in UK cinemas now.