Down on the farm
Emily Blunt gets quirky in ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’
“Wild Mountain Thyme” is a lyrical Irish romance that begins with a narration by a convivial, if dead, man.
That bit of whimsy is characteristic of screen writerJohn Patrick Shanley, whose 1989 romantic fable “Moonstruck” won him an Oscar.
“Wild Mountain Thyme,” which filmed in County Mayo, is Shanley’s nod to his Irish ancestry.
Emily Blunt (“Mary Poppins) and Jamie Dornan (“The Fall,” “Fifty Shades of Grey”) play Rosemary and Anthony, thwarted lovers who live on neighboring farms.
While obviously destined to be together, it also seems, thanks to personality quirks, to be an impossible coupling.
Blunt had just finished filming a pair of major movies that due to COVID-19 have been delayed until next year: Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” with Dwayne Johnson and “A Quiet Place Part II,” which was written and directed by her husband, John Krasinski, whose character was killed off in the first one.
“I had been very much looking for something intimate, a bit left of center and unique,” an upbeat Blunt, 37, reflected. “That craving for something a bit riskier and more independent, a put your feet to the fire, was happening to me.
“Truly this, because it was exactly what I was wanting to do, came along in a rather magical way.”
For Blunt, Shanley was an irresistible draw.
“You know the writing is going to be singularly brilliant. You know it’s going to be a unique experience,” she said.
“There was something about it that was really bewitching. It was almost like a big poem on love and the different ways you can express your love, whether it’s a person, whether it’s your family or whether it’s the land, your farm.
“Also, I’m from that part of the world in England and Ireland where we are so cautious to express ourselves. We are so repressed in saying what we feel. And I think the whole film is really representative of that.”
If these would-be lovers are tying themselves up in knots of their own making, the picturesque settings held a hidden reality.
“Shanley really wanted to embrace everything about living on a farm. We were working on a live farm where we’d have to stop shooting because there’d be a herd of cows being shepherded by. The animals you see in the film live on the farm.
“Rather hilariously,” she revealed with a laugh, “both Jamie and I are allergic to farm animals. We both were on antihistamines up to our eyeballs every day.
“I’m really allergic to horses, I’m really allergic to cows. So it was hilarious the two of us playing these lonely bizarre farmers. We are literally allergic to farms.”