The Testament of Ann Lee
Directed by Mona Fastvold
Searchlight Pictures
The Testament of Ann Lee is a new film chronicling the life of Mother Ann Lee, the foundress of the Shakers. It offers a look at this unusual religious sect that expressed its faith through ecstatic dance and a life of celibate community. Directed by Mona Fastvold and starring Amanda Seyfried, it is a beautiful yet unnerving period piece with elaborate choreography and haunting music.
Lee begins life as a child laborer in a Manchester woolen mill, but she is drawn to a breakaway Quaker sect that believes in the cleansing of sin through shaking. Its leaders also believe that the Second Coming will be soon—and that God will return as a woman. Ann, soon known as Mother Ann, becomes the head of the group. She draws together the congregants in loud singing and dancing. At one point, they interrupt worship at what is now Manchester’s Anglican cathedral. Mancunians’ frustration with Lee and her behavior leads to her being arrested.
While in jail, she has a vision of Adam and Eve, and comes to believe that fornication is the root of all sin. She is married, but her husband abuses her, and her four children died in infancy. The movie, which is rated R, does not shy away from this. There are fairly explicit scenes of sexual abuse, childbirth, and infant death. It is disturbing, but this is intentional. The choosing of a lifetime of celibacy has to be contextualized by her trauma.
Most of the film takes place in the American colonies and, then, the United States, where Lee and a small band of followers migrate after they see no possibilities for spreading their beliefs in England. There is just enough historical contextualization, e.g., touching on the American Revolution, without overwhelming the plot.
Throughout, there is beautiful dancing. While there are some surviving prints and descriptions of Shaker worship, the community did not write down precise performance directions, and so choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall had to take creative liberties. Is it historically accurate? There’s no way to know. But it does make for excellent visuals, and it captures the essence of the ecstasy that Shakers experienced.
The film has a narrator who is a Shaker, and so the vantage point is always in their favor. It creates an interesting viewing experience. The Shakers are portrayed sympathetically, as a persecuted minority group whose members want to spread their faith and live harmoniously in small villages. When they disembark in New York, Lee yells at a man conducting a slave auction. The Shakers reject the view of Native Americans as savages, welcome black members, and both men and women participate in making furniture.
But there are also scenes that reveal the other side of Shaker life: a child being told Ann is her mother now, and the whole community singing—trancelike—about their love for Lee’s precepts. We, today, would likely see the Shakers as dangerous cultists, and react just as negatively to them as 18th-century people did. Certainly we would not enjoy being stuck on a tiny wooden sailing ship with people loudly singing every morning for months. The Shaker point of view makes for a more dynamic and interesting presentation than a documentary would be.
The filmmakers also took pains to accurately recreate the Shaker style of woodworking, building chairs and beds for the film. While most of the movie was shot in Hungary (although there are a few shots at an actual former Shaker village in Massachusetts), it feels authentic, from the crowded streets of Manchester and New York City to their final destination of rural New York. (British readers of The Living Church might frown at some of the attempts at English accents, however.) Unlike many films set in the 18th century, the powdered wigs don’t look absurd.
The film is about Ann, and it ends when she dies. There are hints to later aspects of Shaker life, like a mention of caring for orphans, which contributed to the group’s 19th-century growth. But, fittingly for a religion that saw Ann Lee as embodying God, she is always the primary focus.
The Testament of Ann Lee is a film well worth watching. Some of it is uncomfortable. But it also provokes important thoughts about an authentic Christian life and witness in a time of vast inequality. If unlikely to reawaken Lee’s movement (there are just three Shakers left, living in community in New Gloucester, Maine). But it helps one to understand why others once decided to follow her path.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
