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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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‘Sunset Song’ pretty but unmoving as a tale

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Set in rural Scotland in the years leading up to — and then into — World War I, “Sunset Song” is a gritty and gorgeous film. Perhaps a little too gorgeous, in fact, and not gritty enough.

The film by Terence Davies (“The Deep Blue Sea”) stars English model and actress Agyness Deyn as Christine — or Chris — Guthrie, the teenage heroine of Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 classic coming-of-age tale, and she is a sight to behold. Deyn also can act, you’ll be glad to hear, but the story is hampered by its star’s striking — almost distracting — beauty, which never quite seems that of a hard-working rural farmgirl in the early 20th century, but of a contemporary supermodel slumming in period garb and manure-smeared boots.

The life that Chris leads is certainly hard, and feels it, although her brother, Will (Jack Greenlees), receives the brunt of their abusive father’s wrath. One early scene shows John Guthrie (Peter Mullan) whipping his son with his belt for a minor infraction. It’s like something out of “12 Years a Slave” or “The Passion of the Christ,” and is just as hard to watch. The teens’ long-suffering mother (Daniela Nardini) is treated as something of a sex slave by her husband, ultimately killing herself and two infant twins after a postpartum breakdown.

And the film is barely getting going at this point.

After the mother’s death, more heartbreak arrives for Chris, beginning with intimations of her father’s incestuous desire and, later, a husband, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), who goes from dreamy and sensitive James McAvoy look-alike to bellowing monster and spousal rapist, seemingly overnight, after he enlists to fight in the war. To be sure, Ewan is meant to be seen as a victim of PTSD. But the transformation is so sudden — and, frankly, badly overacted by Guthrie, who seems to have forgotten that he’s playing a single human being, not two — that the tragedy rings hollow.

As horrible as all this sounds, Davies films “Sunset Song” with an unwavering eye for the picturesque, regardless of whether he’s shooting a Scottish wheat field rippling in the breeze or a mud-and-blood-soaked battlefield in France. In short, the movie feels, if not exactly glamorous, then simultaneously overly processed and overwrought, even when it’s wallowing in the most abased behavior.

That distances us from the one character with whom we’re meant to connect.

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