Perfectly poised amid the current madness for period dramas and all things Scottish — slainte, Outlander — comes an elegy to Highland life from polarizing English director Terence Davies.
Fans of Davies’ work are full of praise for his painterly technique, his reliance on natural light and shadow and the way he can frame almost any scene like a modern master. Critics say the lack of action in Davies’ narratives is more like watching paint dry.
Similarly, Sunset Song is a slow, pastoral, historic snippet of Scotland that is punctuated by occasional bursts of violence and joy.
Based on the 1932 seminal Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon — the first in a trilogy, A Scots Quair — the film follows the challenges faced by Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) as she weighs her love for the land against opportunity in a foreign city. “Foreign” needn’t be in a distant land, run, as most Scottish cities were, by the English: “the English words: so sharp and clean … she knew they could never say anything worth the saying at all.”
Chrissy is studying to be a teacher; she is on the cusp of womanhood, a dangerous place to be, given her pious and abusive father (Peter Mullan). In a house over-brimming with siblings it’s not Chris but her poor mother Daniela Nardini) and her brother Will (Jack Greenlees) who take the bulk of the beatings: in a lengthy whipping scene worthy of the flogging scene in Passion of the Christ, the victim looks straight at the camera, as though the audience is complicit.
Tragedy strikes, as it is wont to do, and Chris is left taking care of the family farm with her father, all dreams of escape dashed. It’s not all grim: she meets the antithesis of her father in Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie) just in time to have a brief window of happiness until the Great War descends on them all, bringing dark complexity into their simple corner of the world.
There are hints of Hardy in the way farming the land slowly changes and Chris is a perfect Hardy heroine. As the land changes, so does Chris: she vacillates between a country-girl’s love for the earth and anger at being so inextricably tied to it. But after seeing what the First World War does to the men who survive, Chris concludes: “Nothing endured but the land… The people who lived there were but a breath. At that moment she felt that in the gloaming, she was the land.”
Good performances all around, particularly by Deyn, a former model whose credits include Clash of the Titans and Hail Caesar! This is her most substantial role to date. Guthrie brings a brief gust of joy into the otherwise somber proceedings; poor Mullan, go-to brute, is all-too terrifying in his role.
But back to those paintings: a scene of ladies in mourning looks like the work of Sir James Guthrie (complete with a “do you want to see him before he’s screwed down?” practicality); there’s a lovely extended scene of villagers silently filing to church through a wheat field. Anything framed near a window is pure Vermeer. It’s studious beauty but not without basis, anchored nicely into Chrissy’s grounding in the land.
