MOVIE REVIEW
“Sunset Song”
Grade: B+
Starring Agyness Deyn and Kevin Guthrie. Directed by Terence Davies.
Rated R for sexuality, nudity and some violence. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 15 minutes.
Bottom line: A wartime love story that's beautiful and sad
For years writer-director Terence Davies has been working toward a screen adaptation of “Sunset Song,” the first of the “Scots Quair” trilogy written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Like Davies’ previous adaptation, based on the Terrence Rattigan play “The Deep Blue Sea,” this one is a wartime love story, beautiful and sad.
Parts of “Sunset Song” rank with Davies’ very best work. Shooting on a seamless combination of 65-millimeter film stock and digital camera work, his gliding, calmly authoritative camera eye, often deliberately at odds with the brutalities depicted, captures some arresting passages. One may be unconsciously painterly (in one scene, mourners are grouped as if posing for a Rembrandt), while others belong to pure cinema. There’s a moment when the northeastern Scotland newlyweds played by Agyness Deyn and Kevin Guthrie are surrounded by wedding guests singing “Auld Lang Syne.” The shot dissolves into an identically composed shot of the pair, alone, singing the last line of the song. It’s a familiar tactic, but it’s just right.
The protagonist is Chris Guthrie, one of six children, a tenant farmer’s daughter nearing 20 and studying to be a teacher. Peter Mullan, who has dealt with many of these hard, vicious men before, portrays her father, who sings hymns in the harvest field but wrestles with a terrible mess of personal demons, including incestuous inclinations toward Chris.
Davies’ adaptation keeps Chris somewhat distanced from her own story, though, judiciously, we hear her thoughts in voice-over just enough to savor Gibbon’s carefully distilled poetic language. One by one, Chris’ family members leave her, and at the midpoint, “Sunset Song” has become an oddly joyous song indeed, with the newly emancipated and happily independent woman anticipating a long and fulfilling life with her newfound love, a couple of glens over. Her suitor is Ewan Tavendale, played by Kevin Guthrie.
If “Sunset Song” lacks a dimension, it relates to what’s missing in Deyn’s scrupulous but somewhat dutiful interpretation. (A “Trainspotting”-era Kelly Macdonald would’ve triumphed in the role.) She does everything asked of her, but you catch her acting sometimes. Now and then, Davies and his cinematographer Michael McDonough linger on the fields, or the carnage of a battlefield, in a way that pulls the narrative to a temporary halt.
“Sunset Song” already received the BBC Scotland miniseries treatment, back in 1971. Now Davies, shooting his version in a variety of stunning landscapes he found in Scotland, Luxembourg and New Zealand, has given us his. It’s very good.
