SUNSET SONG
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS D: Terence Davies. UK/Luxembourg. 136 min. Sep 13, 9 pm Winter Garden Sep 14, 9:15 am TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 Sep 20, 12:15 pm Isabel Bader. See listings. Rating: NNNN
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel about a young Scots woman’s maturation and adulthood in the early years of the 20th century becomes a series of emotional grace notes in the hands of writer/director Davies, last seen at TIFF with The Deep Blue Sea.
Agyness Deyn makes a striking lead as Chris Guthrie, who struggles to escape the shadow of her ferociously religious father (Peter Mullan, doing his Peter Mullan thing) and define herself as her own woman, even as she’s drawn towards a young man (Kevin Guthrie) from the village.
Davies glides the story gracefully through time, finding beauty in Chris’s world as well as despair and letting her struggle for independence stand as the proto-feminist choice it is. A shift in tone and perspective very nearly undermines the final movement, but Deyn’s performance holds it together.
