It’s rare that I get angry at the films I review, even when the
film is poorly made, thematically problematic, or even blatantly trading on
offensive stereotypes. Sunset Song is a film that made me mad
though, because it has the lofty expectation that its faux-artistic pageantry will
be interpreted by its audience as intellectual and deep, when in fact there is
next to nothing under the surface of what I hesitate to call this film’s story. I usually try to avoid using the word “pretentious”
(though I admittedly sometimes fail at that) due to my ironically
self-important pen name, but there is simply no better word for it. Sunset
Song is about as pretentious as film-making gets, and I absolutely hate
that.
There isn’t so much a plot to Sunset Song as there are shallow characters interacting within a
setting in various modes of meaningless conflict and banality. Our protagonist is Chris Guthrie, a young
woman on a cusp of adulthood living under the roof of her abusive father in the
Scottish highlands in the early twentieth century. The entire first half of the film is nothing
but a series of tragedies, abandonments, and abuses, as Chris’s mom kills
herself and her siblings all leave home to escape their tyrannical
patriarch. This concludes with the
father having a stroke and Chris purposely ignoring his needs so that he
dies. What could have been a satisfying
abuse survivor’s arc is muted by the fact that we never get much of a look into
Chris’s, or anyone else’s, personality, so the players move around the stage
like dolls in a dollhouse, acting out tragedy with all the nuance of a
first-grade play.
But that isn’t where the film ends. The entire second act is about Chris’s
courtship by a local man, Ewan, who eventually marries her and becomes the
father of her child. The second act of
any film is supposed to function as the escalation of conflict, the point in
the film where stakes are raised and the protagonist is faced with their
toughest challenges. Here all sense of
conflict fizzles away, leaving a dry and protracted stretch in the middle that
is well-suited to anyone hoping for a nap.
When the film finally does bring in some third act drama by way of Ewan’s
enlistment in the army during World War I, it feels unearned and
self-contradictory, simultaneously enabling scenes where Ewan abuses Chris in
ways similar to how her father did and excusing his behavior by alluding to his
fear of death on the front lines. Notice
that I don’t mention Chris’s character development, because other than her
apparent ability to suffer at the hands of the men in her life, she doesn’t
have much of a character at all; Ewan is as close to a fully realized character as we get, and he isn’t the principal focus. The climax of the film is all about his actions and how Chris accepts them, turning what is ostensibly a coming-of-age tale into a neutered telling of how passive acceptance is the key to adulthood, and I think to call that message intentional would give the film too much credit.
All of this shallowness is dressed up in a forced
theatricality, complete with nebulously opaque character voiceovers, overlong
shots that convey pathetically simple ideas, and actors staring directly into
the camera. I confess that I am not
familiar with writer-director Terence Davies’s previous work, but for how much
acclaim the man receives this is a shockingly amateur attempt at cinematic
artistry. Sunset Song is nothing but award-baiting style laid over a story
that doesn’t amount to anything character-driven or symbolically significant,
at least not how it is told here. That
is the definition of pretension.
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