The hermit (Jake Williams) has self-sufficiency as his chief tenet in life, and spends his days in the Scottish countryside, not even encountering anyone else, never mind speaking to anybody. Although he likes to move around the remote region he lives in, he mainly stays in a cottage which can tend to his needs, with its cooking facilities, shower and bed, all of which he makes use of during the cold winter months when the snow falls heavily around. He fills up his days attending to various tasks, often with tools, taking down trees and suchlike in a forestry capacity, and for his entertainment he has access to methods of playing recorded music. It's a quiet life, but he finds it rewarding...
Or at least you assume he does, since the hermit speaks nary a word, and we have to interpret his thoughts as best we can from his actions. This was the first feature length film - about an hour and a half - from experimental director Ben Rivers, and he had made a short about Mr Williams a few years before, but here he really committed to the subject by apparently following him all year round. Now, precisely how much of a hermit you can be when there's a camera crew traipsing after you is a questionable point, and there were scenes where you began to wonder if this was a documentary at all, or if actually the filmmakers were having you on, especially when it came across as a shade too staged to be believable.
One scene in particular, slap bang in the middle of the film, made you think wait a minute, what was going on there? After long stretches of watching the hermit putter about, walk the forest trails and so on, he settles down for the night in his caravan. Early the next morning we witness that same caravan lifted by unseen forces to the top of the trees he was staying under - when he wakes he appears as baffled as we do, and there are no hints on precisely how we are supposed to react to it, was it the faerie folk or were locals playing a prank? Although the caravan atop its new home is seen again, we are none the wiser concerning the point of that scene whatsoever, yet it does indicate a sense of humour is at work.
Indeed, after a while you may find yourself laughing as the hermit continues his eccentric, isolated path through the world; it's not an out and out comedy by any means, but if you've ever pondered the absurdity of existence then there's a lot here to tickle you. Take the choice of music, for example, he likes to listen to Indian sitar tunes as he goes about his business, which is fair enough, but then he puts on a folk song played on crackly vinyl from Dave Goulder (who may have taught Jake the art of dry stone wall building) which details a spectacularly violent confrontation between a sexton and a carpenter. The juxtaposition of the hermit placidly cooking up lunch and the gorefest described in the lyrics is bizarrely amusing, but then this film was full of such oddity.
Only you really had to seek it out, as it was very easy to sit through Two Years at Sea in a state of extreme boredom. Rivers doesn't even explain the title, as his subject never speaks (though he does whistle), so you have to do a little research to discover the reason it's so-called is because Jake spent that time away and that made up his mind to become a recluse. But the field of deliberately boring movies is a paradoxically interesting one, there is not an abundance since the point most filmmakers have for their work is entertainment (or if not that, then to make some profit) so when a picture comes along that steadfastly refuses to play that game, it brings up all sorts of queries in the thoughts as you try to discern a point to say, the lengthy shot of Williams fishing on a home-made inflatable raft, which is more or less him drifting on the surface of a loch with no joy as far as catching anything goes. Rivers teases us with shots of old photographs as hints of what the hermit has left behind, but largely this was a meditative work which became weirdly amusing in its restraint.
