Terence Davies (2015)
The critical reception of Terence Davies’s latest has been cooler than it was for some of his earlier films: it’s less easy to be contrarian about this new movie than about Of Time and the City or The Deep Blue Sea. Sunset Song describes the coming of age of a Scottish girl, Chris Guthrie. According to Robert Hanks’s review of the film in Sight & Sound (December 2015), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel is ‘rooted in the landscape and rural culture of the Mearns, south of Aberdeen, where Gibbon was brought up, and written partly in Doric, the local dialect …’ Davies has wanted, for many years, to bring Gibbon’s story to the cinema screen. It was a financial struggle to the end but you’d never guess it from the look of Sunset Song. Davies and the cinematographer Michael McDonough have produced a handsome piece of work. As usual with this writer-director, it’s also a determinedly gloomy one.
In 1911, crofter’s daughter Chris (Agyness Deyn) is coming to the end of her schooldays. She’s the brightest pupil in her class and wants to go on to higher education. Her family moves to another tenancy in the Mearns area. (The new farm is called Blawearie – a perfect name for the main setting of a Davies picture.) Chris’s father John (Peter Mullan) is a puritanical Christian, a chauvinist and a sadist. He continues to exercise his conjugal rights although his wife (Daniela Nardini) is far from robust. When the Guthries’ eldest son, Will (Jack Greenlees), displeases John, he gets horse-whipped by his father. Mrs Guthrie gives birth to twins after a very difficult labour; shortly afterwards, she discovers she is pregnant again. She takes her own life, and the lives of her babies. Chris and Will’s two surviving younger brothers are taken in by relatives. Will emigrates to Canada. Only Chris is left to keep home for John and help him on the farm. She must abandon all thoughts of training to be a teacher but, when her father suffers a stroke and dies, she is an independent woman. She is courted by Will’s friend, Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie). They marry and have a child. It is now 1914.
Terence Davies gives auteurism a bad name: his work is clearly identifiable often because it’s merely predictable. At one point in Sunset Song, John Guthrie takes on an itinerant labourer and tells Chris the man must sleep in a barn rather than in the farmhouse because he’ll be riddled with lice. Chris takes the man’s food to the barn and stands with the tray. The labourer, sitting in the hay, touches her lower legs and rolls down her stockings. The effect is almost disgusting: this man, whom we’ve already been warned is unclean, now seems dirty in a different way and somehow to threaten the chaste Chris with infection. Davies then cuts to Chris alone in her room: she undoes her nightdress and inspects her nakedness in the bedroom mirror. It seems the pawing labourer has caused a sexual awakening in the girl. As you knew he would. Chris and Ewan’s happy courtship, followed by the survival of mother and baby in childbirth, is more surprising. I liked the way Davies used the flight of stairs in the farmhouse as the wordless recorder of a family history. We usually see the stairs from the same angle – head on – but people go up and down them in a succession of very different situations. Ewan’s descent, on learning news of Chris’s pregnancy, and his ascent, when their baby has been delivered, register particularly strongly.
Davies’s presentation of the early stages of Chris’s relationship with Ewan lulls you into a false sense of hopefulness but the Great War arrives on cue. Ewan is scared both by the prospect of warfare and by the implications of not enlisting. He goes to fight. To say that he is, when he comes home on temporary leave, a changed man is putting it very mildly: Ewan is just about unrecognisable – he’s violently abusive in word and sexual deed. He yells not only at Chris but at their infant son, whom Ewan accuses of being a miserable little bleeder or words to that effect. (The child does look very gloomy, as if preparing for a lifetime in the world of Terence Davies movies.) Chris’s reaction when Ewan returns to the front is not unconvincing – she feels that she’s lost the man she loved even while he’s still alive. This interesting angle is wasted when she learns of his actual death. Chris reverts to standard disbelieving war widow (‘it’s not true – it’s not true!’) Davies doesn’t even let her show that she realises she was mistaken in thinking her love for her husband had vanished because of what war had done to him. The director gets his miserable money’s worth in the closing stages. Chris receives the news of Ewan’s death from a friend called Chae (Ian Pirie), who encouraged him to enlist and who explains to Chris that Ewan wasn’t killed in the trenches but was shot as a deserter. Although he hasn’t used flashback previously, Davies does so now to show the lead-up to and the moment of Ewan’s death by firing squad. Shortly before he’s shot, Ewan begs Chae not to let Chris know how he died. The flashback and Chae’s conscience-driven revelation to Chris are a kind of posthumous double whammy.
The ages of Chris Guthrie and her siblings are a puzzle in more ways than one. Chris and her brother Will appear close in age but their two younger brothers look at least ten years younger. It seems their mother is meant to be exhausted by repeatedly giving birth; I wasn’t sure, though, if we were supposed to assume there had been numerous intervening offspring who died at birth or during infancy. Agyness Deyn had just turned thirty when the film was in production. Although she seems younger than that, she’s plainly too old in the opening schoolroom scene and even in her early married life: Ewan says, shortly after their wedding, that Chris is only nineteen. Best known as a model, Deyn has the beauty and the height to give her screen presence but her Chris Guthrie is a stronger image than she is a personality. I guess this is what Davies wanted: he never gives Deyn the chance to show, for example, how Chris feels about being thwarted in her academic ambitions. In an interview with Nick James in Sight & Sound to coincide with the film’s UK release, Davies explained how he handles his actors:
‘I say to the actors in every film, “I don’t want you to act, but I’ll be there for you. If you do something that’s different than I think is best, stay with it.” That way you give them the freedom to do what they feel. And it’s much, much more powerful if they don’t ‘act’. But they’ve got to have the architecture of the piece, and technique has to come in there, but it just has to be felt.’
Although she has acting experience on screen and on stage, I’m not sure this laissez faire approach always helps Agyness Deyn in Sunset Song. When he tells her the truth about Ewan’s death, Chae explains to Chris that he feels he must do this ‘so that you’ll never be vexed with me’. In response to hearing the truth, Chris says, ‘I’ll never be vexed with you’. Deyn’s stress on ‘I’ll’ is nonsensical.
There are instances of cutting that result in baffling sequences. Will is whipped by his father because he fooled around with the old man’s rifle while John was out of the house. Davies suggests that John discovers what Will’s done after he returns home – but Will fired the gun so quickly after his father left the farmhouse that John wouldn’t have been out of earshot. (In a less careless, highly characteristic moment, Davies has Chris impart the insight that ‘There are lovely things in the world that don’t last – and all the lovelier for that’ as the camera contemplates her brother’s bare, whipped back.) In a later scene, when Will is about to travel to Aberdeen, Chris tells him he needs to hurry up. Next thing, she’s asking if he’s going to have a nap before he goes. He zips upstairs and zips back down a few screen seconds later. The film has been praised for its lyrical qualities although the connection between the changing aspects of the landscape and developments in Chris’s personal experience produces lyricism of a very obvious kind. There are more than enough shots of wind shaking ripening corn, trees in full leaf, and so on. Lewis Grassic Gibbon wrote Sunset Song a few years before Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind. For a cinemagoer, however, Gibbon’s heroine is oddly reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara when Chris Guthrie asserts in voiceover that ‘the land would survive’ and that ‘she was the land’. The use of songs and fine community singing, perhaps this director’s most agreeable trademark, are a consolation in Sunset Song as they have been in other Davies movies.
As Ewan, Kevin Guthrie brightens things up considerably. Perhaps he slightly overdoes the lad’s eager ingenuousness; he’s a breath of fresh air in the film, even so. I sensed that Guthrie simply didn’t believe what he was expected to do as the Ewan traumatised by war. The younger men in the cast generally do well – Guthrie, Jack Greenlees as Will, Douglas Rankine as another friend of Ewan’s, who also dies in the Great War. Getting Peter Mullan for the role of John Guthrie was a remarkably unimaginative piece of casting. Mullan is a good actor but he’s played the lowering paterfamilias and/or men with serious anger management issues too often in recent years: in films such as Neds, Tyrannosaur, even Sunshine on Leith; on television in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. In a movie by a director with Davies’s miserabilist tendencies, Mullan emits a strong abandon-all-hope signal the moment he appears on screen. As a result, this viewer was put in the uncomfortable situation of feeling relieved when John Guthrie was immobilised by illness and glad when he died.
In his S&S conversation with Nick James, Terence Davies also spoke of his determination to resist calls for subtitling of Sunset Song with the North American audience in mind. In principle, this sounds like an admirable refusal to bow to commercial pressures. In fact, much of the British audience will struggle to make out what the characters in Sunset Song are saying too. It’s not just the Scottish dialect either. In a sequence at the beginning of the film, a stuffy schools inspector disparages the French pronunciation of the pupils in Chris’s class (although she then proves herself the exception). Demonstrating how it should be done, the inspector says what sounded to me like ‘une putain’ – slang for bitch or prostitute. It’s a startling moment but I think I must have misheard. Neither the class members nor their teacher turned a hair.
10 December 2015
