“The song of the crayfish” in the cinema: swamp whispers – culture

Marsch is not a swamp, we learn at the beginning of the film, the Marsch is a place of light. The camera glides over sparkling water, brushing past sandbars and reeds, the images are beautiful, straight out of a BBC nature documentary. But even in the march, we hear, there are real swamps here and there. Nature has its dark sides, this intro whispers to us, and that these sides somehow belong. Anyone who is familiar with “The Song of the Crayfish”, the film’s basis for the book, knows that murder plays an important role in it.

“Where the Crawdads Sing”, the modern fairy tale by American author and zoologist Delia Owens, spent weeks on the bestseller list in 2019 New York Times and finally became a million seller in the lockdown years, its film adaptation was only a matter of time. Reese Witherspoon, who says she loves the book, is producing. Taylor Swift contributed the theme song. Daisy Edgar-Jones, known from the series “Normal People” and the horror romance “Fresh”, plays Kya, who lost her family at the age of six and struggled alone in the North Carolina swamps. The residents of the nearby coastal town call her “march girl” derogatory. Kya is considered uncivilized and uneducated. When the child goes to school, it is bullied so badly that it runs away and does not come back.

The film prefers not to know what it’s like to be as poor as Kya

Perhaps it’s the warm light of the South that makes this unfortunate biography look so much better than, say, that of the youthful Ree Dolly in Debra Granik’s film “Winter’s Bones”, who, also without parental support, struggles through to the Ozarks in Missouri. Presumably, however, the creators of “The Crayfish Song” just don’t want to know exactly what – also physical – consequences it has for a child to be desperately poor and only to feed on what the collecting of crabs brings in, the Sold Kya to a friendly black couple of shopkeepers. Or how dangerous it is to walk around for years without shoes in the marsh, where crawling and crawling creatures, branches and thorns are just teeming.

The child, with whom hardly anyone speaks in all this time, doesn’t become stupid and doesn’t become a mental cripple, but transforms from one cut to the next into a self-confident, beautiful, if somewhat naive young woman. Kya knows every stone, every bird, every shell and every plant in “her” march. She moves completely fearlessly in nature.

Olivia Newman’s film adaptation tells Kya’s story in flashbacks from inside prison. Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), a well-known womanizer, was found dead, the “march girl” is said to be the murderer. He was Kya’s lover, she is said to have killed him after finding out Andrews was already engaged by the time he slept with her. A retired lawyer (David Strathairn) feels sorry for the outsider and defends her, also because he doesn’t trust the narrow-minded small-towners to have a fair trial. “To defend you, I need to understand you,” he tells her. And so the “march girl”, who seems closed like an oyster, opens up to this city dweller of all people.

Kya does her thing like a cross between Mowgli and doe-eyed Pippi Longstocking

The narrow, dark cell is the opposite of the open-to-the-ocean marshland where Kya belongs. From the dungeon she tells about her childhood, which fits thematically, because such a youth is always a prison. She tells of the beating alcoholic father and the mother who flees from him; the siblings, who also run away, until finally their father disappears too. Kya – hauntedly played by Jojo Regina as a child – is left alone and raising himself.

The music brings something southern sweet and floating to the narrative. “Crayfish Song” is Southern Comfort for the movies. The beautiful nature pictures fit in with this. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kya as a semi-savage with large, often astonished brown eyes, defensive and at the same time shy, as a mixture of Mowgli and doe-eyed Pippi Longstocking.

Like an animal meeting its mate, Kya meets Tate (Taylor John Smith). The young man is close enough to nature to fall in love with Kya. He teaches her to read and write and makes sure that she feels closer to people again than to plants and animals. Leaves dance around them as the two kiss.

It’s always difficult to say what makes a book or a film successful. But the fact that a young woman who has been betrayed and abused by men successfully defends herself and simply carries on despite everything should please many. Kya can easily be read as an emancipation figure. It is also seductive that it seems to reconcile nature and culture. She draws the plants and animals of the march and can thus assert herself in the human world. “Delia Owens tells (…) that we (…) can’t do anything to oppose the secrets and violence of nature,” Hanser-Verlag advertised for the book, and the film also legitimizes Kya’s murderous struggle for survival with the laws of nature and natural constraints.

To understand this as a feat of feminism would be a mistake and would even lead into a trap. Men have always liked to see women as creatures of nature and themselves as representatives of human sophistication. But who wants to know all that exactly when freedom and purity, success and happiness in love go together so well.

Where the Crawdads Sing, USA 2022. Director: Olivia Newman. Book: Lucy Alibar. Camera: Polly Morgan. Editor: Alan Edward Bell. Music: Mychael Danna. Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jojo Regina, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, David Strathairn, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr. Distributed by: Sony, 126 min.