Terence Davies is perhaps the greatest contemporary director of interiors, capable of extracting from his predominantly working-class settings intense feelings of economic and emotional repression. Frequently contending with his sexuality and the pressures wrought by a conservative and punishing society on his own identity, Davies has often used lavish color and intricate blocking to evoke states of sensual overload that only marginally mask the pain his nostalgic exaggeration attempts to escape. Far more than the director’s decision to shoot on 70mm film, this preference for indoors marks the sharpest division of Sunset Song from Davies’ other work.
Though the subject remains poor like the majority of the filmmaker’s protagonists, she belongs to a time before the war, on the cusp of the working class’ transition from agricultural to manufactured labor. As such, it mostly takes place in the open, on wheat-strewn farmland where peasants till the land for meagre profit. This life does not leave much room for self-improvement, as seen in the struggles of Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), to educate herself into a better life while constantly dealing with the setbacks of economic hardship and the conservative values of her father, John (Peter Mullan), who needs her to help on the farm.
Davies’ films usually unfurl in hazy memories, with unclear timelines and a focus on experiences over narrative. By contrast, Sunset Song is largely straightforward, following Chris as her youthful hope is ground down by intimate and macro-social forces. Davies only rarely employs the hyperreal lighting and tableaux vivant blocking that characterizes his direction, instead filming Chris in such a way that she blends into her environment; her golden auburn hair takes on the tone of wheat, and her plain dresses mark her as earthen. This falls in line with how Lewis Gibbon’s novel portrays the character as representative of Scotland itself, but in Davies’s hands these naturalistic depictions become indicators of her inability to extricate herself from the soil that constantly defers her education.
But if the director approaches the material in a more traditional manner, he still finds ways to develop his usual signposts. Father figures in Davies’s cinema are always, after his own paterfamilias, monstrous creatures whose flashes of genuine affection are corroded and warped by intense violence and tyrannical imposition of will. Even by these standards, John is a piece of work, a man so hateful that his wife is driven to infanticide and suicide early in the film, in an act that scatters the remaining children to relatives but leaves Chris to fend for herself against her father. Davies’ stately direction only enhances the disruptions of John’s outbursts; one scene, of an ailing John encroaching upon his daughter’s room with demented intent, briefly turns the pastoral film into Gothic horror.
The subtle fluctuation of aesthetic tone that leads to that scene also characterizes the brief moments of hope, of possibility and young love that Chris experiences. If Davies dials down his usual elegant maximalism, he nonetheless uses the high image quality of his film stock to make naturally lit shots seem enhanced, somehow. Terrence Malick has become everyone’s favorite reference point for nature-attuned cinema, but Davies captures the same subtleties of wind teasing hair or skin glowing in the sun with decidedly more formal compositions and movements than Malick’s roving kino-eye. There are also flashes of Davies’ usual flair, most especially in a wedding scene that places the bride and groom in center frame in long shot as they lead a group singalong of “Auld Lang Syne,” only for a dissolve to remove all the spectators and leave the couple together, still singing, less like the guests have left than they have simply devoted all attention to each other. It’s such a simple transition, yet it’s the kind of thing only Davies ever seems to think of, wringing thrilling emotional payoff with a single edit while most films couldn’t evoke the feeling with 10 times the shots.
War eventually tears apart what little fabric remained stitched together by the time it breaks out, and if Sunset Song is generally one ongoing tragedy, the toll of the unfathomable rupture of the First World War plunges the final act into new depths of despair. Yet despite the onset of new technology and the upheaval represented by the war, one is left with the impression that the only changes in Chris’s life are the nature of the tragedies that likely would have plagued her anyway. It is here that Davies fully bridges this seeming anomaly in his filmography to his greatest works of domestic strife such as Distant Voices, Still Lives. The film’s depiction of the terror of a new age, and its tendency to pass some people by completely, could make for a fine double-feature with John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. Both look into prewar idyll and find the kind of exploitation and generational malaise that would only be perpetuated by the 20th century. In that sense, the film is indeed personal; Davies may have taken the project out of enthusiasm for a staple of British literature classes, but he ultimately reveals that the turbulent times chronicled in his best work is but an iteration of a constant cycle.
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