News location:

Canberra Today 15°/18° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Sunset Song’ (M) **** and a half

sunset-song-movieTHIS beautiful, emotionally powerful film spends 132 minutes telling the story of Chris (Agyness Deyn) whom we meet as a teenager in the second decade of last century and farewell as the 25-year-old widow of a loving husband who became one of the small group of soldiers commemorated only by posts in Britain’s main military cemetery.

Chris wants to become a teacher. In the Scottish farmhouse where her father John (Peter Mullan) rules with an iron fist, her mother after delivering twin boys born in awful pain again becomes pregnant. The prospect is more than she can bear. Death is the only escape for the three of them. Chris must take her place as cook, cleaner, farm-hand, caring for the two beautiful Clydesdales who provide the farm’s only power that is not human.

Ewen (Kevin Guthrie) courts Chris and before she is 19, she is a wife and mother, managing the farm after a stroke fells John and in a way contriving his death in a manner no better than he deserves.

The Aberdeenshire countryside is very much one of the film’s stars, in all seasons, whatever the event. In a community where only the land is eternal, life ebbs and flows – the farming folk, the villagers, the dominie and the doctor who comes in all weathers. Chris will, in time, come to own the farm. It contains her history and the film leaves us expecting that she will go on to not necessarily a better life but one about which we and she may feel optimistic.

Terence Davies’ filming of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel, published in 1933 two years before his death aged 35, does great honour to not only the land and its people but also to the novel’s powerful narrative inspiration.

At Palace Electric

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

Share this

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Music

Cunio takes top job at NZ School of Music

Immediate past head of the ANU School of Music, Kim Cunio, is to become head of school at Te Kōki, the NZ School of Music, part of the Victoria University of Wellington, reports HELEN MUSA.

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews