SUNSET SONG – Review

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

SUNSET SONG is renowned English director Terence Davies’ adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scottish novel, a drama set in rural Scotland in the years just before and during World War I. Centered on a bright Scottish young woman named Chris, the film is a powerfully moving drama that is at once visually beautiful, in its depiction of the Scottish rural landscape, and realistic in its unblinking portrait of the harshness of working-class farm life and the devastating impact of war.

Agyness Deyn brilliantly plays the lead character, Chris Guthrie, whom we follow from her days as the brightest student in her rural school to her years as a young woman confronting the devastating horror of war from the home front. Chris is a girl who dreams of poetry and of becoming a teacher, and her kind-hearted mother Jean (Daniela Nardini) dotes on her gifted daughter, ensuring she has the time to attend the local college for which she won a scholarship. However, the whole family defers to Chris’ harshly religious, and selfish father John (Peter Mullan) dominates the family, and is particularly abusive towards Chris’ beloved brother Will (Jack Greenlees).

Kevin Guthrie plays Ewan Tavendale, who eventually falls for Chris, while Ian Pirie plays as Chae Strachan and Douglas Rankine play Long Rob, neighbors and friends who play important roles in their lives. Deyn imparts a dark viewpoint, with touches of dry humor, and poetic sensibility to her role as the strong-willed Chris. The film is told from Chris’ point-of view, and is often narrated by her as we follow her from days as a school girl through the challenges of her hard family life and into young adulthood, where the first world war reaches out disrupt their world.

A film adaption of a beloved Scottish novel, one whose themes include resentment towards the distant English rulers, by a filmmaker who has been called a “most English director” seems fraught with risk. Yet, Davies crafts a striking, moving drama that captures the harshness and beauty of the remote land and the devastation of the war on a generation, and a film that is a sort of feminist raised fist, in the form of an indomitable young woman.

The director’s work has been described as poetic realism, a description that fits this film well. Davies’ previous films include an acclaimed adaption of Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” but  the hard life of this Scottish lass is portrayed with a stark, gritty realism that audiences might not expect in a film some might call a historical or costume drama. At the same time, the lead character’s voice of narration lead a naturalistic yet poetic tone, as the young girl reflects on the beauty of the landscape, her love of the natural world, the way the land endures generation to generation. The narration also allows her to voice her darker inner thoughts, her resentment of the limits placed on women, especially bright ones like herself, and her particular circumstances with her harsh, selfish father. There is a sense of foreboding that often permeates the film, creating a tension that something awful is about to happen.

The film’s visual beauty comes from the natural world and the landscape in which it is set. The human landscape is stripped of artificial prettiness, as are the actors’ performances, but the photography captures all the beauty of the land as well as the compelling drama of the characters’ ordinary, working-class farm lives.

A scene that illustrates the film’s remarkable balance between realism and romantic beauty is the one where Chris and Ewan first connect romantically. As they walk along a village street lined with quaint stone shops, Ewan starts to cross the street to her but suddenly is blocked by a flock of beautiful black-faced white sheep, herded by a border collie, who fill the road and create a living stream of shifting life he must struggle through to reach her. The scene is visually lovely but also slightly comic, realistically presented  and symbolic.

The film has a surprising feminist slant to it, and it also touches on political movements of the time and the war that virtually wiped out a whole generation of young men. Characters discuss the then-new idea of socialism and express their resentment of the aristocratic class, particularly their distant English rulers. Before the war intrudes, the characters exist in a land that seems remote from the rest of the world, and they sport a pride in their Scottish history. At school, Chris is acknowledged as their best student and wins a scholarship to a nearby college. But her options are limited by being female and by her family’s working class status. The family rents the land they farm, and money is tight, but Chris’ life is particularly shaped by her father’s whims and ego.

There are both emotional highs and lows in this gripping story. For the first part of the film, the emotional tone is often tense, as if something awful were looming, but then shifts dramatically to one of hope. Scenes of poverty, hard-work and the events of daily life in this rural landscape are played for realism, although anything graphically violent is avoided. When the father savagely beats his son, we see the son’s face, not his back but we also see the father turn the belt so the buckle strikes the boy’s back.. When a woman struggles in childbirth, we hear realistic screams, not something genteel and sanitized. As one character puts it, “we’re not gentry.”

This moving drama’s focus and point of view is almost entirely that of young Chris. The film is both personal and epic, following one woman’s life through a time of change, as a timeless rural Scottish life, where Scottish history and traditions are revered, are changed by the slow seeping in of ideas from the larger world and finally a war that nearly wiped out a whole generation of young men, and which swept away monarchies and centuries-old social institutions, to create the modern world. The film is also both starkly realistic and deeply romantic, with its unblinking depiction of hardships of life contrasted with the magical feel of young love, and a love for the land they live in. It also touches on issues about a war that has been described as the world’s first modern war, as well as a conflict that devastated a generation. The film deals with those facts indirectly, through the raw heartbreak of Chris’s experiences.

Everything in Chris’ life is handled with remarkable realism, and the acting is impressive throughout. The one scene that does not seem to ring true is when Ewan returns home to Chris briefly, after being inducted in the army and trained but before being sent to France. His course behavior before even seeing combat is hard to reconcile with how the character had been portrayed up to that point. It strikes a false note, and leaves the audience puzzled and unsettled, although the film does recover from the misstep. The film’s final scene, again focused on Chris, is moving and heartbreaking in the extreme.

SUNSET SONG is a moving film of love and loss, brilliantly acted and masterfully directed, set in a pivotal moment in history.

SUNSET SONG opens in St. Louis on June 3rd, 2016

OVERALL RATING: 4 1/2 OUT OF 5 STARS