The new film from English master Terence Davies, who paired Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz in a self-destructive affair in The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song stars Agyness Deyn as Chris, a young Scotswoman coming of age in the first quarter of the 20th century, and Kevin Guthrie as her husband, Ewan, who goes off to the trenches of the First World War. Why should you care? They’ll tell you.
1. Sunset Song may be set in the past, but it’s not a mannered Merchant-Ivory kind of picture.
Davies just doesn’t work that way. Sunset Song, like his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House Of Mirth, doesn’t pretty up either the period or the emotions of his characters. “In well-upholstered period films, [the actors] all look as if they’ve just come out of costume and makeup,” he says, noting that those details are seen to be more appealing to international audiences. “That’s deadening. What’s also deadening is yet another adaptation of Jane Austen. I mean, you want to slit your wrists.”
2. It gives Agyness Deyn her first big-screen lead as the stalwart young Chris, and she knocks it out of the park.
Davies picked Deyn – a Manchester-born model who’d had smallish roles in the remakes of Clash Of The Titans and Pusher – to carry his film. “She was the first person in on the Monday morning,” the director recalls. “She just showed up and I said, ‘We found her.’ Someone said she was a model, but I wasn’t interested in that. You can tell when someone can do it. I just get a feeling in my stomach.” Deyn, who made the indie drama Electricity between being offered the role and shooting Sunset Song, was drawn to the idea of tracking the character’s evolution over more than a decade. “You kinda see her go from being a child to being this strong woman,” she says. “This is a very simple strength which was super-inspiring to play.”
3. It was a labour of love for pretty much everyone.
Davies spent 18 years bringing Sunset Song to the screen: “It was three years to get to a final draft, and then another 15 waiting to make it,” he sighs. “It was just impossible to get it off the ground. In the end we all took a chance, because that’s what you do… but there were times when we thought, ‘What is the point of this? I’m sitting in a cow shed and they’re farting all the time there’s got to be something better in life than this!’” But his actors were willing to do whatever was necessary to make the film. “Not every actor gets the opportunity to work with a director like this, you know?” says co-star Guthrie. “There’s a select few. And to be one on that list was very rewarding but equally terrifying.”
4. Davies doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel.
Sunset Song ratchets up the domestic tension when Ewan returns from the trenches with PTSD, meaning the actors had to play some very intense scenes for their director. “It was a massive level of trust that we could have that physicality with each other,” Deyn says, “and we knew, like, the limits. And if we were only gonna do one take of things, we were gonna go for it,” she laughs. “We would be like, ‘We could go again if you want!’ And he was like, ‘I would not want you to do that.’”
5. The movie looks like nothing else, for a very good reason.
To subtly contrast Chris’s sense of connection to the land with her struggle to define herself independently of her father and husband, Davies shot the sweeping Scottish countryside with 70mm film cameras and the interiors digitally. The 70mm footage was scanned in 4K resolution for digital projection. “We couldn’t do it the other way round for technical reasons that I simply didn’t understand,” he laughs.
See our review for Sunset Song here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
