While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts
(Canada/Switzerland, 420 min.)
Dir. Peter Mettler
Programme: TIFF Docs (World premiere)
“Like watching grass grow” often serves as a dismissive phrase. However, the prospect of spending seven hours observing blades of grass—metaphorical ones, anyways—sprout over time proves an enlightening and transporting experience in the latest opus from Peter Mettler. The maverick filmmaker returns with an experimental epic that only he could make. While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts arguably serves as the filmmaker’s most personal work to date. It ranks among his most rewarding films, too, which is high praise for an oeuvre that includes Picture of Light (1994), Gambling, Gods, and LSD (2002), and The End of Time (2012). It’s a rich and philosophical documentary that challenges a viewer, but invites one to marinate in some of life’s deeper questions. Accept the experiment and anticipate rewards.
While the Green Grass Grows features a recurring question as Mettler considers another idiom about grass. He asks several peers throughout his journeys what they think of the phrase, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” This query arises in most of the film’s seven chapters. It yields different responses as participants get philosophical. Many of them reflect on the phrase’s nature as an expression for struggling to appreciate what one has or to embrace one’s position. Considering questions of travel, social status, mobility, health, age, and seemingly every possibility in between those things, While the Green Grass Grows interrogates the fluidity of perspective. It’s something that changes with the ebb and flow of time, but also with experience, environment, and context.
These deep considerations unfold in seven chapters. The first, “Here in this World,” observes the final years of Mettler’s mother, Julia. It features an expansive interview with Mother Mettler, shot intimately in close up. She reflects on the grass question, but also wonders about the future ahead. She gives her son some wise advice: If you can’t see the future, make it up.
Filmmaking, in a way, becomes an act of constructing the future even through the medium itself inherently involves reconstructing the past. Mettler’s sprawling film plays with the elasticity of time as lengthy scenes shot years ago unfold seemingly in real time. The durational nature of select moments, like basking in the fresh air outdoors as a reprieve from Corona-era lockdown, invites one to marinate in the present. By deftly piecing together fragments of the past, the film holds onto the possibility of grass becoming greener over here. Perhaps that’s a muddled interpretation, but Mettler’s film favours questions over answers. It’s not an exercise in wrong reactions.
Mettler, working with film editor Jordan Kawai, builds an astonishing puzzle of coincidences and connections to evoke broad questioning. While the Green Grass Grows finds striking parallels in these quotidian scenes, and yet the free-form nature of the production lends itself especially well to this sort of associative filmmaking. Touring bodies of water and considering forests and greenspaces in Canada, Cuba, Switzerland, and elsewhere, the film evokes a portrait of interconnectedness as water permeates each story, rippling through each human interaction a larger relationship with the currents of the earth. (Although be forewarned: for a seven-hour odyssey, the latter chapters feature lots of water.)
These associations and connective tissues invite an active and immersive cinematic experience, although one might best reconnoitre it in a way that lends appropriate time for pause and reflection. While the Green Grass Grows, which screened in full for this review with an intermission between chapters four and five, might best be experienced as a series with each episode explored as its own adventure to later be taken in as a collective journey, much like 2022 TIFF Docs series Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot. The film’s design invites such a viewing, and the more space one has to marinate in it, the better.
It’s a thinking person’s film and each chapter meanders down its own rabbit hole. (Especially the chapters that actually feature rabbits—some real, some not.) In Chapter 2, “My Grandma Was a Tree,” Mettler enjoys a canoe ride up the Whitemouth River in Manitoba. Joined by writer Jeremy Narby, Mettler drifts literally and figuratively. He and Narby ponder questions of greener grass and the cycles of water.
In the third chapter, “Truth and Consequence,” Mettler hits the road with filmmaker Samara Chadwick. She serves as his sound engineer and fellow inquisitor. They drive to the fatefully named town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico where Mettler has been invited to screen Gambling, Gods, and LSD. The screening introduces Mettler to another enlightened soul. His name is Grant and he proves an exception to the gallery of, “I have a comment, not a question,” cinephiles who pepper these kind of screenings. Grant’s rambling yarn invites questions of its own as he shares a soul-searching anecdote about encountering God on a hillside. “My heart slammed into the mountain,” he recalls. The Old Testament violence of which he speaks leaves one wondering about which side of the encounter with God yields the greener grass.
Later in the odyssey, Mettler deals with life under lockdown as the COVID-19 pandemic affords him nothing but time. The film offers one of the better time capsules of the fresh hell of the COVID years. As Mettler faces the declining health of his father, Freddy, the stakes of social isolation becoming alarmingly present. Freddy’s decline comes not through symptoms of viral infection, but rather the loneliness that takes its toll as the old man spends long stretches alone, making Julia’s absence doubly painful. The sequences from COVID are hard to relive, but they’re thoughtfully considered takes about connection and isolation, but also again, this idea of greener grass inspired by the ideological backslapping that COVID introduced: the great equalizer, the great reset, and what have you. But few eras have such a collective awareness of time and its fleeting nature, and Mettler harnesses this aspect of 2020 especially well.
Perhaps the finest chapter comes midway through While the Green Grass Grows though. In the fourth, “Freddy’s Diary,” Mettler brings his father to a cottage in Killarney Provincial Park. It’s not too longer after Julia has passed, but is in September 2019—a fateful calm before the storm. Freddy’s cognitive decline is evident even though country setting and crisp fall air soothe him. In one memorable sequence, Mettler sits with his father as Freddy revisits his diary entries from recent days. He jumbles the timeline of their trip, muddling the travel date and forgetting which day they went out for lunch and had some fish—although Freddy recalls that the fish was pretty good.
Mettler’s voice arises from behind the camera, patiently correcting his father over and over. There’s an air of both concern and bemusement: details that slip through the fingers are reason to worry, but his father still grasps the bigger picture. (Who cares when you ate the fish if you enjoyed it?) The rapport between the father and son is strong and loving. It’s in these scenes, rather than the COVID ones, that Julia’s absence is most strikingly felt. Here again Mettler lets audiences enjoy the moment in the present tense as Freddy flips back and forth between pages of the past, trying to recollect memories, while also starting an entry for that very day before it’s even done. In that moment, the film envisions past, present, and future; or, put another way, it perfectly realises Julia’s advice to just make the future up. It’s the one chapter in which Mettler doesn’t ask his scene partner about the grass being greener on the other side: it’s hard to imagine the blades feeling more fertile than they do in this moment.
