Sunset Song
Aberdeen Agyness.
The past is a foreign country, and rarely more so than when it’s deep rural Aberdeenshire in the years before World War I. Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), growing up on a remote croft under the fierce eye of her patriarch-bearded father (Peter Mullan), dreams of a wider world but remains tied to the land where she was born. Terence Davies, working to his own script, lovingly adapts the classic 1932 Scots novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon into a film that moves with the rhythm of the seasons. Fans of fast-paced action may be put off, but for those who can adjust to the ruminative pace of Sunset Song, there are riches in store.
After her eye-catching turn in Electricity, model-turned-actress Deyn here finds a role ideally suited to her wide-eyed expressive features and pre-Raphaelite beauty. As Chris, growing into womanhood, becoming ever more conscious of her independence and sensuality, she gives a deeply felt performance, well matched by Mullan as her brutal dad. (Oppressive fathers have long haunted Davies’ work, linking back to his early autobiographical films like Distant Voices, Still Lives.) Michael McDonough’s camera pans lovingly across the glorious Highland landscapes (much of them, admittedly, shot in New Zealand) as the action sweeps over the years and the shadow of war reaches out to darken and destroy the lives of this small community.
It’s not all poignancy. There are moments of humour and whole scenes of celebration – not least Chris’s wedding, her barn spruced up for feasting, music and dance. And for all the visual grandeur this is a film of touching intimacy, the sense of one life experiencing joy and hardship and surviving it all. Only towards the end does the film start to stumble, with an ill-advised transition to the mud and desolation of the trenches that breaks the integrity of the action. But that apart, Davies’ long-nurtured plan to film Gibbon’s novel has come to rich fruition.