Until Branches Bend: Preachy and Peachy All at Once

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

A film about a pregnant Okanagan cannery worker who discovers an invasive beetle crawling out of a peach, Until Branches Bend contrasts some prevailing tendencies of indie films. On a thematic, allegorical level, it’s predictable. On a psychological and sensory level, it’s experimental, artisanal, and open-ended.

The feature directorial debut from British Columbia-based production designer Sophie Jarvis was originally titled Invasion, a horror movie title covering the themes of feminine, environmental, and colonial domination. Under it’s more poetic new title, it suggests cycles of nature, and a certain otherworldly-ness of ripeness and timely fulfillment.

Things start prosaically enough. During a break at work, Robin sees a hole in a peach and cuts the fruit open. A beetle crawls out. She takes the bug to her foreman Dennis (Lochlyn Munro), who refers it to his manager who advises him to ignore it. Robin, who is curious, takes a photo of the bug to a local research centre. They identify it as an invasive species and move to shut down the fruit-sorting facility.

As news about the bug whistleblower becomes public, the fruit industry and local community attempts to discredit Robin. Meanwhile, a couple of Indigenous characters remind us of the ongoing environmental harm done by such industries to their traditional lands. As a rather obvious corollary to the bug in the peach, Robin is pregnant, single, and struggling to get an abortion. The nearest clinic is five hours away and she’s already at the 10-week mark.

Shot in 16 mm in the heat of summer, Until Branches Bend has a carefully considered, dreamy look, especially in outdoor scenes when the peaches dangle voluptuously from the trees. In the role of Robin, Grace Glowicki has a unique, gangly physical presence.

Typically dressed in a camisole and loose jeans, wearing frameless glasses, hair in a bun, Robin is wearing a preoccupied fixed expression that, intermittently, cracks. When the middle-aged Dennis — who appears to be the man who got her pregnant in some ill-considered though consensual encounter — brushes aside her concerns, she looks as though she has been slapped. When the townspeople turn against her, she reacts like someone in physical fear and begins to spiral into a nervous breakdown.

Things start to go full horror-movie mode. Robin spends a night frantically tearing apart a mound of peaches in search of bugs. When she cracks an egg, which turns out to be fertilized, she recoils at the blood streak in the yoke.

Meanwhile, the unsettling soundtrack buzzes and hums with insect sounds, bursts of flute and a cappella vocals. The family dog obsessively digs at the roots of a front-yard peach tree. In one sequence, shot in shadowy contours, Robin bends and contorts in her bed and apparently, miscarries a peach.

Later, as the bug invasion spreads, Robin stands outside her house, arms raised, Christ-like, in a storm of flying beetles. Are we to consider these poetic hallucinations, directorial flourishes, or supernatural events? Frankly, it’s fuzzy.

A sub-theme here is women’s healing solidarity. Dennis’ Indigenous wife (Quelemia Sparrow) proves a useful ally. A subplot involves Robin’s relationship with her pretty, teen sister Laney (Alexandra Roberts), who’s infatuated with a college-educated city boy Fabien (Antoine DesRochers) working the fruit farm for the summer.

Boy-band handsome but generally insufferable (he mansplains statistics on rural health care and teen pregnancy rates), he’s another example of an invasive species, threatening to leave his spore in the local fruit.

Until Branches Bend. Written and directed by Sophie Jarvis. Starring Grace Glowicki, Alexandra Roberts, Quelemia Sparrow, Lochlyn Munro and Antoine DesRochers. Showing at Toronto’s Revue Cinema April 14-16, and 18, and with other cities across Canada to be announced.