![]() ![]() ![]() In fact, this primal contrast of human suffering with natural beauty is a paradigm that persists in resurfacing in British social realist movies today.Ĭhris is the intelligent, resourceful young woman in a dirt-poor farming family who is torn between her instinctive attachment to the land – she is seen in the very first shot reclining in a field, languorously drowsing in it –and yearning to get away, to be a schoolteacher in the big city. This is a story that explicitly counterpoints the passing joys of youth and love (here called the “lovely things … that didn’t endure, and the lovelier for that”) with that unending glorious earth, the only thing left, now that the sea of faith has retreated. But in Sunset Song, Davies has found something not available to the haunted figures of those earlier movies, and that is the beauty of nature and the land, suffused with a sunset glow. It’s a project that Davies has been nursing for many years, revisiting and restating the dark themes that have animated him since the early works from the 1980s, such as the autobiographical Trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Lives – the hardship and cruelty of working-class family life, the schoolroom as an aspirational way out, the sins of the father, the terrible burden of forgiveness. T erence Davies’s Sunset Song is a movie with a catch or sob in its singing voice: a beautifully made and deeply felt adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel of rural Scotland before the first world war, in The Mearns on the north-east coast. ![]()
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