Few filmmakers have British director Terrance Davies’ acumen for mingling wistfulness and skepticism. Whether telling his own stories (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes) or adapting the works of others (The House of Mirth, The Deep Blue Sea), Davies conveys a swooning affection for the past, while also portraying its reactionary ugliness with clarity. So it is with Davies’ latest feature, a fetching but hard-bitten adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song, regarded as of the seminal works of 20th-century Scottish literature.
Chris (Agyness Deyn) is the eldest daughter in a burgeoning family of poor farmers in the Mearns of northeastern 1910s Scotland. Her father (Peter Mullen) is a pious, domineering brute who beats his adult children and coerces his wife (Daniela Nardini) into repeated pregnancies. Studious and kindhearted, Chris has ambitions to become a teacher, but a succession of tragic events block her egress from the provincial world of her upbringing. The film thereafter follows the ensuing years of Chris’ life, as she is married to a charming local boy, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), and the winds of the Great War eventually reach their pastoral community.
Davies, characteristically, deftly captures the book’s realist depiction of a liminal period in rural Scottish life. He dials back the source materials’ pidgin dialect of Doric Scots and English, but still helpfully includes subtitles for viewers whose ears can’t discern every thickly accented line. Sunset Song boasts splendid visuals and peerless period design, yet Davies’ most conspicuous contribution to this version of the story is his distinctive blend of unabashed nostalgia and bitter cynicism. Through Chris’ relatively narrow experience, he captures the vanished pleasures of pre-industrial country living while never flinching from the vicious effects of religion, patriarchy, and nationalism. For Davies, such delicate artistic feats are par for the course.
Sunset Song opens Friday, June 3 at the Tivoli Theatre, 6350 Delmar.
