Sunset Song

source: Sunset Song

Sadly, my experience of this film fell a long way short of the encouraging flyer and enthusiastic local newspaper reviews. While it is visually impressive, and capturing what Scotland probably looked like in the very early 1900s, I just never got the point of what it was all about. The sound in our local art-house cinema was fairly quiet, and combined with accents and what I suppose may have been local dialect words meant I missed quite a few possibly critical words, which couldn't have helped. But it really seemed slow, and outlasted its welcome. I understand it is based on the first book of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's highly regarded Scottish trilogy (which I've neither read nor heard of). Maybe the book would allow more personal imagination and the anticipation of possibly happier times to come. But there's not a lot of uplifting encouragement in this outing. Agyness Deyn as Chris Guthrie was visually convincing, ageing from a high school girl to an early 30s mother of a six year old. But somehow her strength of character in the high points wasn't matched by the quiet, slow and lethargic impression in most of the film. There was little explanation of why her father was as he was, nor her husband's behaviour in his brief return from WW1. If it's appealing to you, I suggest go to the cinema, because I think the small screen would remove this film's strength – its visual impact.

The rolling green hills and fields full of shimmering golden wheat looked so nice in 'Sunset Song'; "Ah", I thought, "The Scottish countryside is lovely." Then I read in the end credits that some of this British/Luxembourg co-production was shot on location in New Zealand. Oh. Possibly I was admiring Kiwi hills instead... Anyway. The setting is agricultural Scotland in the early Twentieth Century, and the main character is Chris (Agyness Deyn), a teenager who outshines her classmates (not surprisingly as she looks considerably older than most of them) and who dreams of being a teacher. She lives on the family farm with her overly-controlling father (Peter Mullan), who routinely beats her brother in-between making pregnant his wife (Daniela Nardini, who doesn't seem to have had a good meaty role in years). The story, based on a famous Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, follows Chris through several years of happiness, motherhood and bereavement. Mullan does his usual one-note bullying schtick, although, to be fair, the script allows him little scope for anything else. As Chris, Deyn is competent, if the viewer ignores one or two flatly-delivered lines - perhaps she was concentrating on her accent (and why hire an English actress to play a Scotswoman anyway? Were all the Scottish actresses busy? It's not as if Deyn is a Winslet-like big name who is going to put bums on seats). As for the story, it seems to lurch from one scenario to another, with little to connect it all up. It's possible some vital scenes were left on the cutting-room floor (for instance, any explanation of why Chris' happy, worshipful husband is transformed into a rampaging sexist monster after what the film suggests is merely army training which, I should think, would last only a few months, not the five or six years the ageing of his son seems to suggest!) Characters wander into the story then disappear with no explanation (eg: Chris' son and the man who helps her on the farm while her husband is away). It all gives the film a strangely disjointed feel... ... but somehow the end result is greater than the sum of its parts: this is an enjoyable production. Deyn makes a personable heroine and the story has a comforting predictability. The film seems shorter than its 135 minute running time - and with films as with business meetings, what greater praise could there be?

I went into the movie not knowing anything about the book, the model or what should have been the proper soldiers dress. I also don't know a good accent from a bad one when it comes to Scottish. I felt the movie was gorgeous but some scenes were dragged out too long, especially closer to the end. I felt the actress was believable and saw the characters personality was much like the film itself, slow moving and deliberate with few outbursts but when they happened they were believable. I didn't understand the husband. Why not slog through it rather than become an a-hole? but I guess he was determined. To me this was stupid and the wife should have been angry, then forgiving, rather than understanding. The story was a view into what it may have been like back then helping me to see real people in real tough situations but who also had God and nature to nurture them. It is the beauty of the film that has stuck with me. I didn't know Scotland was that gorgeous.

Grass Gibbon's trilogy was so great, so well adapted by the BBC years ago and in fact so well loved that it makes me sad to watch this movie. Stiff was the word that came to mind regarding some of the acting. Slow to start and remains so throughout the film. Why not use real Scottish actors for all parts? Not sure, but it may have helped this film. Another thing that could have helped was that the writers read the trilogy before writing the screen play. I like many in the audience wanted to like this film, but were sorely disappointed. Overall the scenery was outstanding, some of the acting was very good, but in general give this a pass, it is a disappointment.

An amazing drama about the life, especially it reveals what it would be like being a woman farmer living in the early decade of the twentieth century. The film was adapted from the book of the same name that's dealt with the rural Scottland subject. Even though I'm not familiar with the original material I would say it was one of the best novel-to-screen translation I have seen. The long runtime has never been the issue, but slowly, solidly told tale. My only disappointment is that it was not in the Scottish language since it was about a Scottish family. There were many Scottish dialects that I did not get at first, so I had to google them to know the meaning. But I liked it which reveals the true nature of the local culture. I meant it essential to narrate a tale in the native flavour to enhance the richness in its contents. The story sets in the 1910s that centres on a farm girl named Chris. An epic life journey from the girlhood to womanhood. Under her atrocious father, the film tells how the whole family was living in the fear. After a death in the house, the event slowly begins to tear the family apart, leaving Chris behind to take the ultimate decisions about her future and the family land. Anybody would definitely feel bored in the initiation part, because you won't understand the story right away. If you manage to survive in the first half, then you can easily get through in the remaining by liking it a lot. It was nothing like we know the story or we don't, it was simply about the twist and turns of somebody's life just like ours, except it was from a different timeline. Precisely to say the phases of life is what this film is all about. Like shifting the gear in the car, according to the condition of the road and the destination. The joy and sorrow are the part of the life which is sometimes depends on the decision we and around us make. "You will need to face men for yourself. When the time comes, there's no one can stand and help." It was totally an unexpected film, kind of reminded me 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Love Comes Softly'. Focused mainly on a woman, in the men dominated world. It was not just a rural theme, but also sometimes takes us beyond to other topics. Like during the first world war and under the English dominated UK, how the Scots lost the rights and their culture disappeared. No doubt why Scots are asking for their own nation. The romance was another turning point in the story, like raising strong from the fall. After seeing lots of similar changes, I was unable to predict what conclusion may come. But it was strong and intentional with some wonderful dialogues. I loved the beautiful landscapes from the different seasons. It was actually shot in the New Zealand, Scottland and Luxembarough. There's no expansion in the locations, mainly it sets in and around a farmhouse and very occasionally other than these parts. The one in the Chris' shoe was amazing. Like usual, Peter Mullan was fantastic and similarly others as well in their short stay. As the story progress, consequently the film characters reshuffled. Even for us, the main character Chris is like crossing through a juncture from the coming-of-age to self- discovery. Displaying the transformation of Chris from a certain period of time was the film's great achievement. Like how a landscape change from the dawn to dust, this woman's life sees the same fate. That's what the title implies. I don't know this British director, but this film opened a new door to me further to check it out his other works. I don't know either that everybody would like it, but it is really one of the wonderful drama of the 2015 and I recommend it to all, especially if there's no problem for you for a long story told in the slow pace. I hope they make films out of the remaining two books as well. 8/10

Firelight, swells of the North Sea, hayfields, rain, a wedding dinner by candlelight, mist, the morning sun, green mountains, Scottish song, clothing fashions from a hundred years ago and the writing of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, are brought to life. It is said that nothing but the land endures, yet there is something about each of these characters – good and bad - that endures too. Intriguing characters include a sensual, pretty and bright young woman who loves the landscape and dreams of a better life, a strict and abusive farm family patriarch in desperate need of an intervention and anger management classes, and a young man turned bitter and cowardly by war and violence. The story is told mostly through the eyes of the young woman, Chris, as she grows and experiences hardships as well as bliss. It is amazing to witness her transformations through the people she comes in contact with, the land and the emotions she feels. Kindness, love, nature and light endure when we let them. Anger, violence and hatred make them the lovelier for that. The director is obviously extremely experienced and capable at such historic United Kingdom stories. He invigorates the senses in sight and sound, and we even almost feel the emotions of the characters and smell the hay, mist and mud. I suppose this is the "memory realism" style I read about. Remarkably, and appropriately to the themes of the story, Davies does not shy away from the rawness of anger, sex, nudity and violence. He is equally adept at bringing out the beauty of the story as well as its darkness. There is exemplary acting here especially by the leads, yet with the exception of the one who played Ewan (each of his moods seemed the same to me). For those few who can differentiate between the sectors of Scotland, the film takes place in Northeast Scotland. The excitement of another "Florida premiere" was palpable (LOL!) at this 2016 Miami International Film Festival screening.

Seeking irredeemable Presbyterian gloom? Then Sunset Song is the haggis you crave. Critically if unconvincingly acclaimed, it's set in rural 1900-ish Scotland, the part where the scenery is well, OK, but hardly of malt-whiskey-ad beauty. Our heroine is Chris, a lovely and intelligent girl now going on to 'college'--meaning secretarial school as understood at the time. That doesn't happen but never mind —as we're told by the incessant bloody narration, Chris is in love with THE LAND! She identifies with it! Spiritually! Hard to believe, but the narration absolutely insists. Home life is hell or a little worse but Chris survives to make a wonderful marriage. Then that goes bad, and she is sort of inconsolable. Fade out. You can stop reading here unless interested in all the loose parts that drag the thing down. We open with a scene of closeness between Chris and her best gal pal--who then simply disappears. Chris says her Pa is a wool-dyed socialist, committed to universal justice, but that disappears too, and instead we get a religious tyrant who beats his grown son bloody, drives his wife to infanticide and suicide and tries to rape Chris but dies in the attempt. There's another unsuccessful rape attempt, this by the hired man, but it means nothing to the story. The Son should have murder on his mind, but he simply leaves; end of HIS story. After Ma's suicide, two surviving younger siblings are brusquely shipped out: end of THEIR story. Chris runs the farm almost alone yet is somehow an extremely good farmer, at least in the romanticized kind of agriculture retailed here: much moony contemplation/joyous reveling re the (semi-lovely) land, little reference to the back-breaking slavery that rural farming actually was. Enter farmhand Ewan, a gentle, loving, considerate, good- natured paragon of Mr. Right. Theirs is a marriage of the made-in- heaven variety, so catastrophe is guaranteed. Ah yes--World War I. Ewan goes off to the army and returns a brute, a savage, a monster. He's barely through the door when he rapes Chris, which he does nightly. Oh!--the horrors of PTSD, right? Well no. Ewan has been totally dehumanized by a mere few weeks of basic training! When he does go to the front, he immediately deserts, is immediately caught and immediately shot for a coward. We close with Chris sobbing into one of Ewan's shirts, crying piteously "I understood." What? Doesn't she identify with THE LAND anymore? Those who consider narration death to movies, and pointless details likewise, will call this a multiple homicide. The filmmakers' failure here is due to inability to manage the novel that is their source. Turning a novel into a movie almost invariably means leaving LOTS of stuff out so as to focus on the essentials. That didn't happen here, and the result is a barely coherent mess, heavily larded with tedium.

The father of former San Francisco Mayor Jack Shelley once told him, "The day you forget where you came from, you won't belong where you are." This advice is not lost on Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn, "Clash of the Titans"), a young woman coming of age in Terence Davies' ("The Deep Blue Sea") Sunset Song. Adapted from the 1932 novel of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and set in Scotland in the early 1900s, the film is more than a song of sunset, it is a symphony of the fields and lakes and distant mountains of Aberdeenshire and a young woman devoted to the land, harvesting the wheat, lying in the sun, wrapping herself in "the old star-eaten blanket of the sky." Talking of herself in voice-over, she says, "Nothing endured but the land. Sea, sky and the folk who lived there were but a breath. But the land endured…she was the land." The gorgeous painterly views photographed by cinematographer Michael McDonough ("Winter's Bone"), however, does not conceal the isolation felt by those coming up against a system that ostracizes anyone standing against the town's social and religious conformity. Women especially are at a disadvantage. They have to endure sex without contraception, painful and often fatal childbirth, and marital beatings and rapes that are considered part of the marriage vow, "for better or worse." The film traces Chris' growth from an intelligent but passive student to an adult both willing and able to stand up for herself. At first she is seen in school where she is admired for her excellent French pronunciation. At home things are different, however. The Guthrie farm is run by the patriarch, John (Peter Mullan, "Tyrannosaur"), a sadistic bully who beats his son Will (Jack Greenlees) for minor infractions such as naming his horse "Jehovah," and forces his wife Jean (Daniela Nardini) into repeated pregnancies. Both Will and Jean find a way out in vastly different ways, but Chris, having given up any hopes of becoming a teacher, endures her brutal father until he is felled by a stroke. Fortunately, her paternal aunt Janet (Linda Duncan McLaughlin) and Uncle Tam (Ron Donachie, "Filth") arrive to take her younger brothers back to raise in Aberdeen but Chris carries on at Blawearie, running the farm herself. As Ma Joad said in "The Grapes of Wrath," "With a woman, it's all in one flow, like a stream - little eddies and waterfalls - but the river, it goes right on." Like the strong-willed Bathsheba of Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd," Chris never succumbs to her mother's cynicism about men, falling in love with and marrying a local farmer Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie). The scenes where the Ewan and Chris find happiness in marriage and childbirth are the most joyous of the film, especially when Chris sings "The Flowers of the Forest" at their wedding, but, there are signs that it cannot last. When World War I is declared, anyone who doesn't enlist is labeled a coward, accused of refusing to fight for God, King, and country. Succumbing to threats from Reverend Gibbon (Jack Bonnar), Ewan enlists but the war will change him forever and make him unrecognizable to those who are closest to him. Chris bears her fate in poetic terms, saying, "There are lovely things in the world, lovely, that do not endure, and they're lovelier for that," but her positive feelings soon turn to denial. Sunset Song is a beautiful film and a tribute to those who have the courage and patience to endure pain. Though there are many moments when we know that we are in the hands of a master but the film, in spite of its physical beauty and compelling message, never reaches the emotional depth necessary for a truly powerful experience and the haunting music of a bagpipe at the end only suggests the great film it might have been.

Who were the "North Highland Regiment"? No "ladies from hell" that I've ever heard of. And why the Latin shoulder numerals "IXI"? That's not even a real or feasible Latin number. Is my sight failing, or did the soldiers' shoulder insignia say "Brecknock"? Wasn't that a battalion of the South Wales Borderers, as in "wrong Celtic country"? Did someone just find a bundle of WW1 shoulder badges on a market stall and decide to use them, without bothering to Google what regiment or even what country they were from? Laura Hollins (let's use your real name, not your gibberish fantasy one) gives birth to a baby several months old. Next thing we know, the boy is a few years old but Laura looks exactly the same age. Other reviewers have already noted other discontinuities with which this film is riddled. The slow, linear narrative is likable enough. Whether Hollins' Doric is credible is for Scots to judge. But botching basic details breaks the spell. I don't feel cheated of my ticket money. Just disappointed that such basic authenticity was botched by lazy and ignorant prop-buying and film-making.