Keswick Film Club - Sunset Song

Synopsis

Plus Q&A with Terence Davies

'Sunset Song' starts with a sweeping shot of a cornfield, which comes to rest on Chris as she rises up out of the corn: we are about to watch a film about country life and a young woman's coming of age there.

Whilst the photography is beautiful, Chris's life is certainly not: She loves the life on the farm, even though she dreams of other things, but her father (played by Peter Mullan, our second sight of him this season) is an old fashioned patriarch who rules his family with a rod of iron.

It is not till Chris meets Ewan that she begins to see there could be happiness at home too but even that lies under the shadow of the approaching First World War…

'Sunset Song' was adapted - from the classic 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon - by writer/director Terence Davies; "Patriarchal regimes and the broken clockwork of dysfunctional family life are hallmarks of Davies films dating right back to his debut, 'Distant Voices, Still Lives'. To 'Sunset Song' he also brings some of the impressionist wanderings that characterised his last film, 2011's 'The Deep Blue Sea'" - Henry Barnes, Guardian.

Chris is played by Agyness Deyn, who, if the reviews are correct, has stepped brilliantly from top model to top actress in this role (via 'Electricity', seen here in 2014).