THIS 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.
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