Starring: Agyness Dean, Kevin Guthrie, Peter Mullan
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Runtime: 134 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2016
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British director, Terence Davies, has had a long career, acquired a very strong reputation, but has not been able to make as many films as he would like, at one stage almost 10 year absence from the screen owing to lack of financing. He has made some classics, especially Distant Voices, Still Lives, one of the most compelling and sadly harsh portraits of an English family, The Long Day Closes, a version of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, a powerful version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea and a forthcoming biography of American poet, Emily Dickinson.
For this film he has gone to a novel by Lewis Grassic Gribbon, a Scottish setting, the years before World War I and into the war itself. Location filming was done in Scotland as well is in New Zealand.
One of the things to consider with Davies film is that it is more than likely to be slowly-paced, meditative with a touch of the contemplative. There is more than ample time to immerse oneself in the lives of the characters, in the atmosphere of their surroundings, to listen to what they have to say as well is to what they don’t say.
The central character of this story is Christine, Chris, a young woman, with a voice-over narrating and commenting on her story. She is played somewhat passively by Agyness Dean. She is one of five children, her farmer-brother the object of the fierce and bullying attention of her stern father (Peter Mullan doing yet another more than harsh father), two younger brothers with the birth of another baby, her mother enduring the difficult life and circumstances of her marriage and the family, it all becoming too much for her.
Chris is a reader and writer, intent on becoming a teacher but circumstances alter everything and she inherits the farm and some money from her parents. While an uncle and aunt take the young children for care, Chris remains on the farm, working very hard. There is a certain grimness about many of Davies films and this one has its moments of gloom for Chris as well.
One of the young men around the town, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), seems a bit insignificant when we first see him but he is attracted to Chris and, eventually, she to him, a romantic union which seems to be heading for happiness.
The film gives a great deal of attention to life in Scotland, the times, customs, work, the countryside – although it is interesting that a number of Scottish bloggers question the feel and the authenticity of some of the characters and the situations. For those of us who are not in the know, we accept the presentation of this Scottish life.
The community seems remote, outside Aberdeen, but there are rumblings of war, and eventually the war breaks out, young men volunteer, others like Ewan are committed to their farm – but the pressure of the patriotism of the time, the sending of white feathers to those who do not join up and are considered cowards, become too much for Ewan and the story assumes an extremely downbeat tone, Ewan going to war, the loneliness of Chris and her son, the effect of the close trench warfare taking some toll on Ewan. And audiences, now aware of the traumatic stress of war experience are reminded of how drastic was the action by military authorities on those who did not measure up to expectations.
The title suggests that this may not be an entirely happy film, nor is it. It is one where the filmmaker wants to re-create a world and immerse his audience in it, for both better and for worse.
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