Sunset Song
A fine adaptation of a Scottish classic
“Nothing endured but the land,” narrates Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song’s final act as day breaks over a ring of standing stones. Terrence Davies’s adaptation of the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel is heavy with soil, sun and the unchanging hills of the Scottish highlands, its' labourers forced to accept modernisation and its families uprooted by war. Chris, played by Agnyess Deyn, has come of age and lives with her abusive father and oppressed mother in their Kinraddie farm at the turn of the century. The hardships faced by Chris and her eventual ownership of the family farm bare resemblance to this summer’s Far From The Madding Crowd, but while Hardy’s story is tinted with romance and a yearning for rural life, Sunset Song is almost its antithesis. For the Scottish working class their future seems uncertain and bloodied.
This is only Davies’s seventh film in four times as many years, and a film in development for over a decade before any kind of funding was attained. It’s not difficult to see why. While we remain with Chris on the farm for the entirety of the film its scale is brutally epic; characters die behind closed doors and the shrieks of childbirth are more present than not as summers turn quickly to winter.
Davies’s script and the cinematography of Matthew McDonough create a varied approach to a narrative that feels fragmented but ultimately contributes to an atmosphere that's beautiful but dirty: endless pans over rippling cornfields, infrequent clips of voiceover from Chris and scenes made up of single, unmoving shots. What holds it all together of course is Agnyess Deyn, an actor previously seen in the remake of Nicholas Winding Refyn’s Pusher and last year’s Electricity, who carries the film virtually on her own shoulders as Chris moves from one adversity to another. Peter Mullan’s John Guthrie is perhaps the most striking, detestable father to be put on screen recently, his dedication to the traditional Christian life at odds with his violence, both in the bedroom and in the fields the first hurdle that Chris must overcome.
Sunset Song is a film that deals with national identity in the face of social upheaval and, though some audiences have damned it for its inauthentic dialect, it’s a fine adaptation of a Scottish classic. If Davies ever decides to tackle the remaining two books in Gibbon’s A Scot’s Quair trilogy this reviewer is happy to wait another twenty years.
7.5/10
