August 16: Sunset Song (2015 -- Terence Davies)

★★★★★

In another summer of superheroes, Sunset Song reminds us of other things that cinema can do.  Terence Davies brings as much big and showy to the screen as Zack Snyder, but he uses it to entirely different effect.  Sunset Song is a rich two hours that moves at the easy pace of reading with all the complexity that a novel can maintain.

Cinematic beauty fills the screen.  The actors are as handsome as fashion models and quaffed to perfection.  When we see Ewan Tavendale framed in a doorway with beads of mist condensing on his hair, we could be looking at an image from Vanity Fair.  Rich, wide landscapes punctuate the outdoors scenes, and interior shots are sparsely furnished and naturally lit, often as though from a soft single source.  And Davies softens the light with gauzy filters and uses backlighting that blends his subdued color palette even further.

Sunset Song’s camera also creates onscreen beauty.  In one shot, the camera starts with a closeup on the back of Chris Guthrie’s head as she washes her face from the edge of a small pond dock.  With the pond symmetrically laid out in the frame’s background, there’s a real beauty in this image.  But the camera begins to draw back to include more of the background and creates a different beauty as the composition changes before our eyes.  Chris becomes smaller and smaller, and the shot becomes one of a landscape.  Not only does the camera movement emphasize the theme of Chris’ oneness with the land, but there is a cinematic pleasure in watching such beauty unfold on the screen.   Davies’ camera moves in such purposeful ways throughout the film.  And in addition to camera movement, the angle of shots gives us imagery to appreciate.  One low shot fills the screen with tilled earth as a horse-drawn plow approaches from the top of the frame, and one high angle shot turns the locals into small figures on a large landscape.  Davies’ camera fully exploits the strength of the visual in cinema.

Beyond their beauty, such images contribute to the complexity of theme and character that informs Sunset Song.  Through the story of Chris Guthrie, the movie shows us the challenges facing a woman at the turn of the century.  Chris is bullied by her father and forced to do the demanding work of the farm, yet she lacks the opportunity her brother has of leaving the farm to try to live better elsewhere.  Her mother warns her of the limited choices she can expect as a woman before killing herself to avoid more bullying by her husband, and Chris raises eyebrows in her village by deciding to run the farm she inherits rather than marry.  The scenes of Chris in the landscape develop a second theme of the film – the way a connection to the land helps her stay strong in the face of all the trials she faces.  She emerges from the earth early in an early shot in the film and becomes one with it as Davies’ camera moves around her outdoors.  And the voiceover refers to her connection to the land many times, a connection that gives her not only strength but also transcendence, as though the land will give her knowledge and immortality rather than social institutions like government or religion.  The link between the visuals and the narration makes this theme especially strong.

And Sunset Song takes the time to create complex characters with subtlety.  Chris’ father is a terrible man, yet the movie gives us moments of sympathy for him as when we see him worry about providing for the family or when he is dying.  Chris’s brother loves his sister deeply yet leaves her to pursue his own goals.  And her eventual husband, Ewan Tavendale, starts as a loving husband and father but returns from WW I as an abusive spouse; his arc ends in a deeply poignant inversion when Ewan is executed by the state for desertion, an act that simultaneously affirms Chris’s reliance on the land as foundation of life and her skepticism of national institutions.  The film ends with a shot that pans the detritus of a grey battlefield from above in the same way we’ve previously seen the film pan a field of russet hay from above.  The contrast of the shots both expresses the film’s theme of the importance of an attachment to the land and shows us what has happened to Ewan as government has reached all to way to members of small farming communities.

The tight control and complexity of Sunset Song make watching this film a deeply pleasurable aesthetic experience.  It weaves its cinematic beauty and its themes into a unified whole in a way that other films of our action hero summer don’t.  Or, for that matter, than most films can.