Pretty wheat fields dominate Sunset Song

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      Starring Agyness Deyn. Rating unavailable

      “The sea and the sky and all the people were but the breath,” sighs the narrator of Sunset Song. “Only the land endures.” She’s articulating the epiphanies of Chris Guthrie, heroine of Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel, then notorious for its gritty realism. It comes to us via this highly aestheticized adaptation by Terence Davies. Unfortunately, the director of U.K. classics The House of Mirth and The Long Day Closes takes those words too seriously.

      Played by startlingly elongated model turned actor Agyness Deyn, crimson-haired Guthrie is a bookish high-schooler in rural northeastern Scotland. She dreams of college and the wider world at the start of the 20th century. But her reality is circumscribed by a brutish father (Peter Mullan, of course) who regularly beats her brother (Jack Greenlees) and keeps their mother (Daniela Nardini) perpetually with child. Her prospects both deepen and narrow when she meets kindhearted farmer Ewan Tavendale, played by coincidentally named Kevin Guthrie. (Like many here, he was featured in the Proclaimers-based musical Sunshine on Leith.)

      This rare positive connection is inevitably interrupted by the larger horror of World War I. But Davies gives little more weight to the sweep of history than he does to changing patterns of sunny wheat fields or winter storms, as phenomenally captured on 65mm film by widescreen cinematographer Michael McDonough. The pristine locations alternate between Scotland and New Zealand, with one sequence shot in Luxembourg. Capping a sometimes excruciatingly slow 135 minutes, that last bit stands out for abruptly jumping in time and place.

      Amid the often impenetrable Scots dialect (subtitles, please), the famously tuneful director allows glimmers of real emotion to surface only when people start singing, while the remaining drama falls flat. Deyn may be well suited to the director’s painterly compositions, but her unprecedented moment of “big” acting at the end is cringe-inducing on several levels. Davies clearly prefers the land to its people, so why did he bother with melodrama he cares almost nothing about?

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