Sunset song
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Sunset song |
| Original title | Sunset song |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2015 |
| length | 135 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Terence Davies |
| script | Terence Davies |
| production |
Sol Papadopolous , Roy Boulter , Nicolas Steil |
| music | Guest Waltzing |
| camera | Michael McDonough |
| cut | David Charap |
| occupation | |
| |
Sunset Song is a British film drama by Terence Davies from 2015. It was based on the 1932 novel Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon , which was published in Germany as Das Lied vom Abendrot .
action
On a farm in rural Aberdeenshire , the teenage Chris Guthrie lives with her parents and three siblings on a farm. Chris is considered the most talented student at her village school, reads a lot of books and later wants to become a teacher. After a family quarrel, domineering father John Guthrie rapes his wife Jean, who becomes pregnant and gives birth to twins after a strenuous birth. The family then has to move to a larger home nearby. Jean feels increasingly unhappy in her relationship with her husband and warns her daughter Chris of the horror and humiliation of rape. Meanwhile, Chris is starting her teacher training course. When Jean learns that she is pregnant from John again, she poisons herself and the newborn twins. The two younger siblings are housed with childless relatives, while the oldest children Will and Chris now have to support their father alone with the farm. Chris gives up her studies for this.
The family's situation worsens again when Will - who suffered particularly from his father's brutality and was often beaten - looks for a job in Aberdeen and later emigrates to Argentina . John soon suffers a severe stroke , leaving the work on the farm entirely in the hands of Chris. John bullies Chris from his bed and tries to keep his position of power with threats, but his physical condition is too weak and he dies a little later. In his will, he bequeathed the entire property to his daughter. Instead of selling the farm, Chris decides to stay on the farm and continue to farm it. Meanwhile, she gets closer to Ewan Tavendale, a young man from the neighborhood who is also Will's friend. They decide to get married, even though it is considered improper in the village that Chris should marry so soon after their father's death.
The marriage between Chris and Ewan is harmonious, although he cannot fully understand their education and life-defining love for the Scottish landscape. They have a son named Ewan junior. A few years later the First World War breaks out and also reaches the Scottish province: As a young father with pacifist views, Ewan does not actually want to commit himself to military service, but the village is dominated by the priest's sermons and the opinions of the village authorities high social pressure. Anyone who does not answer is called a coward, and laws to enforce recruitment are planned. Ewan goes to war and returns on his short vacation as a mentally worn, completely changed man: He insults and rapes Chris, who does not put up with it for long and holds him back with a knife. The two part without a kiss goodbye. Chris later receives a letter stating that Ewan died in Belgium . When Ewan's friend Chae comes to her on home leave, she finally finds out more: He was executed as a deserter when he wanted to return to Chris and his son because he could never kiss his wife goodbye. In the last scene you see a thoughtful but unbroken Chris standing on a hill, she remembers the deceased in the setting of the evening sun.
Production background
Director Terence Davies worked on the film project for 18 years. He became aware of the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in the early 1970s through a radio play series on the BBC and was fascinated by the book. While Sunset Song still enjoys cult status in Scotland, the book has become little known outside of Scotland. After Davies was able to realize his first film projects with the support of the British Film Institute , this support in the search for funding for a film adaptation of Sunset Song was lost in the early 2000s. He was therefore unable to find sufficient funding for Sunset Song for over a decade , and only succeeded in doing so after his film drama The Deep Blue Sea .
In the lead role, Davies cast the former English star model Agyness Deyn in her first major film role. According to his own account, he had never heard of Deyn before working on the film, but she convinced him most during the casting. In addition to Scotland, some summer scenes were also shot in New Zealand near the city of Christchurch , as the film was only allowed to shoot a limited number of days and the weather in northeast Scotland, where Gibbons' novel is set, is mostly rainy even in summer. The outside scenes of the film were shot on 65mm film , while the inside scenes were shot on digital material.
Reviews
Based on 114 reviews by professional film critics, the film has a positive rating of 81% on the American critic portal Rotten Tomatoes .
Matt Zoller Seitz for RogerEbert.com gave the film the highest rating and wrote that the film combined old-fashioned and novel elements of filmmaking in a convincing way. You feel thematically reminded of John Ford's family dramas and visually of David Lean's screen epics, but Davies is not afraid to show the ugly and hard sides of life in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century. However, he does not cannibalize the fate and treat his characters with empathy , and the film is always aware of the historical, political and social context of the plot. Seitz praised the achievements of the actors and the camera work by Michael McDonaugh. The film has a "stoic quality" and, especially in the voice-overs of the main character, an "awareness of eternity that is rare in Western cinema."
Among the few German-language reviews, the Filmbulletin writes that in Sunset Song Davies only seemingly replaced the “dim interior” of his previous films with opulent landscape shots. As in many of his films, Davies again shows a violent family life. The melodrama is undermined by "elliptical gathering", instead he shows in many scenes tense family members silent in "planimetric tableaux vivants, which sometimes freeze into still lifes". Despite the "distanced staging", Davies creates a "great emotional closeness to Chris", music and singing together also played a leitmotif and structuring role, as in many of his previous films. The “sensitive film by Terence Davies that is at the same time most conventional in its linearity” tells of the end of an era with the outbreak of the First World War.
Web links
- Sunset Song in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Sunset Song - An Interview with Terence Davies. In: 4: 3. August 1, 2016, Retrieved October 27, 2019 (American English).
- ↑ Matt Zoller Seitz: Sunset Song movie review & film summary (2016) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved October 27, 2019 .
- ^ Sunset Song (2016). Retrieved October 27, 2019 .
- ↑ Matt Zoller Seitz: Sunset Song movie review & film summary (2016) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved October 27, 2019 .
- ↑ Sunset Song (Film Bulletin). Retrieved October 28, 2019 .