While Grassic Gibbon sought to confront these unpleasantries head-on, Davies isn’t so naturalistically inclined, crafting each shot as one might a painting, where compositional concerns trump any outward display of emotion - at least, until Chris receives that fateful telegram, finally giving Deyn a chance to act. As the autocratic master of the family, John dominates his eldest son Will (tender-looking Jack Greenlees) via merciless belt whippings, and moves them all to Kinraddie estate in order to accommodate the addition of two twins - too much for wife Jean to handle, with grim murder-suicide consequences that Davies sweeps to the margins. It’s almost best to watch as one might a silent film (one embellished by Gast Waltzing’s regional-string score and several traditional Scottish tunes), studying the actors’ mostly impassive expressions for clues as to what their characters are feeling.įor much of the movie, the Guthrie clan’s every decision is dictated by its stern, God-invoking father figure (Peter Mullan, less monstrous than he appeared in “Tyrannosaur,” yet every bit as fearsome). Even if a distrib were to add subtitles, the film could be a challenge for English speakers to follow, patiently unfurling at a speed that will strike contemporary audiences as far too slow - though it’s useful to remind oneself that boredom itself is a relatively modern concept. As its title implies, “Sunset Song” serves as the elegy for a lost era, with its patriarchal Christian values and half-forgotten colloquial expressions (the novel comes with its own glossary).

“There are lovely things in this world, lovely that do not endure and the lovelier for that,” a young Chris observes with a wisdom that will serve her well later in life, when loss increasingly comes to color her experience.

Even the notion of avoiding military service is more easy to rationalize today, whereas it would have been seen as an act of egotism or cowardice. Clearly, the land takes precedence here, while human souls are merely in its service - an old-fashioned modesty lost upon today’s fame-seeking individualists. By so dramatically privileging scenery over language, Davies effectively renders this debate moot (he shot in Scotland and on distant New Zealand locations in order to do justice to the novel’s harvest-cycle arc). That scene occurs nearly two hours into a film whose lilting quasi-poetic narration is all that remains of the tug-of-war between Chris’ hardscrabble obligation to the family farm, Blawearie, and her love of books, which might have led her down a different path to become a teacher.

Sunset song novel