The fugitive nature of time

This is a Festival review of Sunset Song (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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11 November (Tweet added, 13 November)

This is a Festival review of Sunset Song (2015)

This is a review, resulting from a screening at Hyde Park Picture House (@HydeParkPH), Leeds, during Leeds International Film Festival (@leedsfilmfest, #LIFF29)

Peter Mullan has a conviction to his acting that is palpable, and his character dominates the family in which Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) grows up : because we are frightened of what he will say or do, we believe in her fear or hatred, and that of her brother Will, and we wonder at the life that their father’s wife Jean (??*) has with him. The narratorial voice both guides us to what Chris is to experience, and, at the same time, distances us from it, in prose that is crisp and sharply given, and which reminds of Neil M. Gunn in Highland River.

Top man Peter Mullan taking about the character that he played in @SunsetSongFilm : https://t.co/je4w1QH3aS

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2015

Do we have hopes for Chris, bright and studious - and adamantly not seeing herself as Chrissy ? Yes, of course we do, but we hear of the almost unacknowledged conflict in her heart between books and the pull of the land, and, in the same way, she affirms knowing that time is fleeting, but yet would deny it : no reason why she, a Latin scholar, should not wish to see things in ways that reflect the thought of the classical period.

Catch them as post-modern thinking wishes to do with its various media**, we hear several times acknowledged here that life will offer wonderful things that are just of the moment, and Chris, knowing that and that things fade, somehow hopes that they will not. Her stance of defiance is against familial and societal expectation, but we see how, when much else in life and nature answers to forces of changeability, she is not proof against them. Chris is left vulnerable, and it is through her story that we learn of the effects of history.

Some may find insufficiency in this film (or its source ?), but Terence Davies shows us what he wants us to see, without forcing us to look. For those with whom he is in tune, and who know that this is his way of working, Sunset Song (2015) opens up, and never feels like a novel or a script, but a fully felt piece of cinema. As sensitive as he has always been to the perspective and voice of women, Davies glosses over nothing that forms who Chris is and how she responds to her situation. At times, such as when learning that he is to be a father, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) may seem as though he is going through the motions, but, in the most important of matters, he is true to their life together, and what it meant, and her disbelief at what she is asked to believe about him is vindicated.

In filmic terms, Davies has worked wonderfully with his director of photography Michael McDonough on making darkness visible in the many interior scenes. Although he does not aim to overwhelm or seduce us with his visuals, except that care is at the heart of them, he does not deprive us of shots that rest and restore the eye, and he employs an economy of means in his story-telling and in the representation of family brutalities. One hopes that his work commends itself to those who love A Scots Quair, and that he may be invited to adapt the other two novels by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.


End-notes

* Not for the first time, IMDb (@IMDb) does not help here...

** Often enough the representations are inadequate, not least in the face of the glories of a landscape.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Surprise on Leith

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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29 September

Yesterday's Surprise Film 1, which Tony Jones had said was a world premiere, turned out to be Sunshine on Leith (2013), the musical with songs of The Proclaimers.

No one expects great depth from musicals, I guess, but the way that the film started, with one voice in a personnel carrier, then a voice in harmony, from two young soldiers who proved to be friends and one of whom was the boyfriend of the other's sister, was evocative - understated, unexpected, it set the tone for the whole film. Many a musical weaves its course around the songs, as Ben Elton might agree, and it is not unusual that their lyrics drive the story, but these, taken from a stage version, seemed a good fit.

In Screen 2 at Festival Central, the quality of the sound was excellent, such that the clarity was there whether it was Jane Horrocks singing, or Peter Mullan, whose voice I quite liked. Mainly charting the ups and downs of the relationships between those two as a couple, and between the existing couple with their daughter, and between her friend and their son, as set up on a blind date. Strain causes travel for one couple when they split up, and the past catches up nastily until differences can be reconciled.

In a blaze of onlookers willing the remaining pair not to be stubborn and back into each other's arms, and then symbolically re-enacting the 500-miles song with a ranks of them moving in formation, the situations and the music that establishes them culminate, having built throughout the film, whether mocking up a proposal and marriage ceremony in the pub, or bemoaning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, as a type of female ambassador in one of Edinburgh's galleries.

I am no great fan of musicals, by and large, but this one did it for me : it felt right, it cheered without being sentimental, and it faced up to some of the things that come between those whom we love and us.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Short films at Festival Central (1) - Long Distance Information (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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28 November

* Contains spoilers *

Director / writer : Douglas Hart

Curiously enough, a 75-minute play of this name was directed by Stephen Frears in 1979 as an episode of Play for Today.

Be that as it may, because looking for the dates of these shorts has unearthed other exact or similiar matches on IMDb, it adeptly explores the characters' assumptions and ours about what is happening, and it is often what we - or they - hear, or imagine that they hear.

We are straight into the film, with Alan Tripney's head seen sideways on a stained piece of wood, and the sounds, as he rouses, of a raised Scottish male voice from below. Tripney makes clear both that he is used to this, and that he despises the man.

We begin to make assumptions about who this man is, where Tripney is, and, eventually, what he is doing when he picks up the phone and - unusually enough - literally dials a number, from memory. (As to how long the number was, marks off for not paying attention, but I had thought him pissed off enough to be ringing downstairs, although it was unlikely that he would know the number.)

In the meantime, we have been introduced to Peter Mullan, exercising his tyranny (and not seeing how it is received by Caroline Paterson) from a chair that bears a passing resemblance to the one in Tripney's room, and refusing a suggestion that he should watch The Queen, so we believe that we know where we are, for his cantankerous reign is conducted firmly, but not by shouting.

(There is, though, a feeling that Paterson just lets him think that his assured condescension rules the roost, and that asking him about the Christmas broadcast was done to irritate without him realizing.)

Once he stirs himself to answer the phone, there is just about a conversation during which Tripney and he talk to each other, though it is clear that they have nothing to say, and that the one question that gets asked - why the son isn't there - would have been better not asked. And then these males have it all turned on their heads, and the stunned response that comes from them is, seemingly, their pride jolted too much for their ease.

I'd gladly see this again, this time to see how it builds to an end. All three principals are excellent, with Tripney seeming like a son who would have such a father, but the accolade must go to Mullan, for embodying him.


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Tired old nag of a film (2)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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25 January

And the amazing thing is that Peter Mullan (who could have done with being given a lot more to do in Trainspotting (1996) than the role of Mother Superior) is in this opus:

Some may not know his name, though - whatever one thinks of its ruling idea - he added immensely (as did his opposite number, Olivia Colman) to Paddy Considine's conception of Tyrannosaur (2011), but, for me, this is almost as incongruous as realizing that Robert De Niro really was playing the part of Tuttle in Brazil (1985)*!


* I haven't seen it since, and should, as it is a great film - than which many a Gilliam production is a pale (or very pale) lamp**.

I also must have known at the time, but I have just been reminded, that he had the great Tom Stoppard alongside to temper his inclinations on the writing side - I wonder if anything reveals how those two got on (other than in the finished film)...

Interesting also, I think, that Terry Jones was accepted as the director of the Python films (more or less, give or take a few grumbles about his perfectionism regarding certain aspects of a take, whilst ignoring what others sometimes thought more significant). Which could have been because Gilliam was in so many ways in a different relation to the others or that he simply had not developed in that way - not, at any rate, until his contribution to The Meaning of Life (1983).


** And I do not know whether I am being unfair to Gilliam for his direction, or to Robin Williams for that certain worthiness that he seems to have in all his acting (or to both), but The Fisher King (1991), for whatever it could have been without, sadly gave rise to a feeling akin to having gorged on too many Easter eggs (when that time of the year, marking Christ's death, necessarily had a highly chocolatey character, such that one could easily do it)!


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Tyrannosaur - rex or regina?

This is a Festival review of Tyrannosaur (2011)

This is a Festival review of Tyrannosaur (2011)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 September

This is a Festival review of Tyrannosaur (2011)

I couldn't get director / writer of Tyrannosaur Paddy Considine interested in the idea that his lead man (a role for Peter Mullan, seemingly written for him, by my judgement) could have been female, and his key opposite number (beautifully played by Olivia Colman) not Hannah, but Henry - Joseph (Peter Mullan's male) would have been, say, Josephine.

For him, a separate film - not the film that he had made - end of answer. (OK, I agreed in the question that the dynamics would have been different, but wondered whether he had ever considered wbat I was suggesting - he didn't say that he hadn't, but he clearly hadn't.)

A separate film that he would watch, if I made it. I told him that it was showing the next day.

At the moment, much as I thought Tyrannosaur was a good piece of work, I still view it as following on from the same actor (same name, even!) in My Name is Joe - oh, it did say different things, but it was a similar sort of world, a similar sort of desire to get out of it...


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