Sunset Song

Sunset Song (2015) is one of those worthy, well-meaning, and earnest films that you put on your queue and, then, avoid watching for years.  The film was directed by one of cinema's pre-eminent poet-directors (Terence Davies) and has excellent acting and production values. Crammed full of rapes, beatings, and gory childbirths, the picture is certainly not boring -- but I must admit that I found it peculiarly offensive.  Although Davies is probably world-cinema's most poetic and sensitive director, Sunset Song is stupidly and explicitly brutal and strangely literal-minded -- it is maudlin and bathetic, the opposite of poetic.  In this regard, Sunset Song presages the awful devolution of Davies' poetic gifts obvious in his totally banal and offensive A Quiet Passion, a 2016 period film about Emily Dickinson that subjects the poor writer to a whole barrage of terrible illnesses and seizures -- in the end, Emily Dickinson is, in effect, reduced to paroxysms of convulsion; her verse scanted by the gruesome depiction of her last illness.  She's not a poet but a collection of garish, hideous symptoms.

Sunset Song is based upon a famous novel by a Scottish writer, Lee Grassic Gibbon, published in 1932.  (The book is highly celebrated in Scotland where it achieved status as Scotland's best-loved novel in 2016 -- possibly as a result of publicity arises from this film.)  The book is a "coming of age" novel involving a young woman named Chris Guthrie (played in the movie by the remarkably beautiful English super-model Agyness Deyn).  Chris suffers all sorts of horrors but ends up affirming her life in the Scottish highlands.  The highlands scenery, paradoxically shot in New Zealand, is a major thematic element in the film -- we see golden fields of wheat, deep green valleys, and turbulent skies full of storm clouds; sometimes, the fields and old stone walls are picturesquely draped in snow.  In this beautiful terrain, the Guthrie family lives, terrorized by their savage patriarch, John Guthrie.  (Peter Mullen who was indelible as the vicious, if henpecked, hillbilly criminal in Ozark plays John Guthrie uttering impenetrable and unintelligible Scottish curses into his beard and beating everyone in sight.)  After raping Guthrie rapes his long-suffering wife, she suffers through difficult childbirth (portrayed mostly by bloody forearms and horrific shrieks) and has twins.  When John rapes her again, and she ends up pregnant once more (she's about 50 years old), she takes matters into her own hands by poisoning herself and the two babies.  Some of this was a little unclear to me because the characters speak in Scottish and, without subtitles, there is no way of understanding what they are saying -- "sighing and moaning/ or ilk green loaning/  the flowers of the forest/ are a wede away":  even with the subtitles engaged, some of the dialogue and diction, particularly in the songs is hard to decipher.  Guthrie's violent treatment of his son drives him away.  Guthrie then has a stroke and we are treated to about five minutes of the vicious old man writhing in the mud -- strokes, paralysis, and awful seizures now seem to be Terence Davies' stock-in-trade (he showed such things in similarly tasteless and awful detail in A Quiet Passion).  Old Guthrie still has a lot of juice in him and tries to rape Chris, although he has hemiparesis and can't accomplish much beyond wriggling around on his belly on the floor. He dies and we get another lengthy open casket scene -- Davies' likes these sequences also.  Chris falls in love with a local lad and, for about 20 minutes, the film relaxes from its somber and morose tone and becomes a charming pastoral bucolic -- the scenes leading up to, and around, the wedding are the best in the movie because they are the most musical and least dire.  (Many of Davies' most magnificent earlier movies are, in effect, musicals, most notably his greatest picture The Long Day Closes released in 1992, an affectionate tribute to movie musicals that sustained Davies' during his own difficult childhood.)  Just when things seem to be looking up for Chris, her husband gets denounced for not enlisting to fight in World War One.  Shamed, he signs up.  When he returns from France, he has implausibly become an even more brutish rapist and misogynist than dead John Guthrie.   Chris has to threaten him with a knife.  Later, we learn that he has deserted and been shot as a coward in France.  It's not enough to Davies to have someone report this -- he, then, violates all of the norms of his movie, except for his sadistic desire to film in long sequences different types of human misery, and cuts away to France where we see Chris' husband shot by a firing squad.  (Up to this point, the film has cleaved religiously to Chris' point-of-view, but this goes by the wayside when Davies' gets a chance to stage an execution.)  We're supposed to mourn the poor fellow but he behaved so horribly to our heroine, raping her in another of Davies' tasteless displays of cruelty, that we don't give a damn about his fate -- in fact, the audience is puzzled by the heroine's moping around after the brute has been shot:  one expects she would pleased to have him out of her life.  The movie ends in a puzzling way with a long penultimate shot tracking over a vile-looking field of mud, debris, and bomb craters -- apparently a battlefield in France -- and, then, ending with shots of some standing stones (apparently significant in the novel but just picturesque window-dressing in Davies' film) and the heroine who declares "you can do without day if you have a quiet lamp lit in your heart." 

Davies' is drawn to images of physical suffering either in childbirth or terrible illness or the results of cruelty inflicted by one character on another.  This is ultimately both disturbing and tedious.  He is the opposite of elliptical -- if something awful is going to happen, he puts the camera in the room and licks his lips as he records the misery.  An example of the degradation in Davies' style is a gorgeous sequence involving parishioners marching through golden wheat fields to their church -- on the soundtrack we hear the Orpheus Choir of Glasgow singing a wonderfully beautiful hymn that begins "All the April evenings, April airs were all abroad".  The camera tracks in a stately motion through the church recording a sermon by the preacher in which he demands all the men in the parish enlist to fight the German Kaiser and that anyone who hesitates is a "pro-German coward."  Maybe, pastors preached this way in Scotland in 1916, but the scene is over-the-top, "laid on with a trowel" as they say, images and words that seem out-of-character for the otherwise reticent farming folk.  (Davies shot a similar bravura tracking sequence in a church in The Long Day Closes that is one of the masterpieces in world cinema and much more accomplished than his work in this film.)  Davies' makes his points with such literal-minded excessiveness that the whole thing seems embarrassing, simple-minded, and, even, unrealistic.