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I can never make out if that is grief or relief
J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country (1980) is a small, strange, and beautiful novel. When I discovered it a dozen years ago, I fell in love at once with its intricate, delicate, deceptively tranquil and incisive meditation on the dissonance and interrelation of art and trauma and regeneration and time and all that may be found and lost in it. To my very great pleasure and surprise, I may love Pat O'Connor's A Month in the Country (1987) even more.
The plot is established so simply, it can be mistaken for scenery. In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin (Colin Firth) arrives in the village of Oxgodby, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, to undertake the restoration of a late medieval mural long since limewashed over in a local church. The field on the other side of the churchyard is the site of a similar exercise on the part of James Moon (Kenneth Branagh), the finding of an excommunicate's grave. Both men are veterans, their antiquarian commissions fulfilling the bequest of the late Miss Hebron, much to the disapproval of the Reverend J. G. Keach (Patrick Malahide) who mistrusts scholar-soldiers and their disturbances of the past, whether that means the distractions of the fifteenth century or the tremors and nightmares of the Western Front, but Alice Keach (Natasha Richardson) brings a traveling rug to the dark-haired stranger sleeping like a church grim in her husband's bell-loft. She introduces him to her roses, the great creamy ones that bloom just until autumn: "So you'll know when summer's ended because I usually wear one of the last in my hat." By then, we will know the change of seasons by other things, secrets working their way to the surface like shells, understandings left to lie like a subsidence in the grass, the pattern that has settled out of gramophone records and mugs of tea and the cacophony of a pedal organ and the silence of a violin as powerfully and incompletely as the excavation of a basilica or the reemergence of a fresco. It is emphatically not a film in which nothing happens, however glancing or extraneous it may seem at the time; the narrative is extraordinarily concentrated for how crowded it doesn't feel. It is a film where as much matters in the lacunae as in the action. Nothing comes out of time as it went in, not personal histories or cremation jars. As Tom explains his fragile, responsible work, "One dab too few and some poor chap won't get back from five centuries ago. One dab too many and—wiped him out forever." We hold none of it whole, not even ourselves. We shore our fragments among the ones we find and go on.
It is not an idyllic film; it is not an elegiac one, either; it has exactly the heat-stunned, languorous timelessness of high summer that will clarify one sudden morning into the turn of fall, but not yet. Days pass in a milk-haze of light so thick and heady, it seems always on the verge of gathering to a storm such as broke over Tom as he trudged his first dismal way from the station to the church, a tall threadbare figure overburdened with his meager possessions and the shell-shock stammer that clicks like a jammed trigger in his throat, but like so much else in this picture the weather remains in a curious state of anticipation, a liminal suspension where if nothing changes, then everything might. Even the triangle that begins to form between the three principals does so almost invisibly, like cropmarks coming out in the field-crisping heat; it is left to the audience as much as Tom to map the potential meanings of an invitation to a foxhole, the promise of a haunting, the gift of a bag of Ribston Pippins or a packet of Woodbines. The film departs from its source material in presenting both the vicar's wife and the archaeologist as romantic options for its dislocated hero, but it's stronger for the scrupulous balance it maintains between them, contrasting and paralleling their attractions and complications until it begins to feel as though it would be unfair to accept one and not the other, a kind of photonegative OT3. Appearing out of a nimbus of sun between green leaves like a pre-war, even pre-lapsarian reverie, Alice with her wild thing's stillness and her half-shy smile seems to embody the peace of a countryside that was never churned like a soldier's psyche with broken men and horses and mud. "No, you shouldn't," Tom says firmly when she tries to extend her imaginative sympathy from the painted torments of medieval hell to the hell on earth she can glimpse without comprehending through the darkened windows of his eyes, "I'd rather you didn't." With her roses and her apples and the deep-tangled, sun-shafted wood grown right up to the door of the vicarage, she looks like the respite of the land itself, an Arthurian consolation for a fisher king's wounds. No such projections of innocence attend Moon, who appears the better-adjusted of the two veterans—bumptious, gregarious, indefatigably sunny—to anyone who doesn't sleep within earshot of his night terrors. He still wears his service jacket, ghost-ranked by its missing insignia; he sleeps in a trench dug as neatly as a reenactment, though especially with its trodden tarpaulins and the bell-tent pitched over it, it looks just as eerily like an excavation site. Recognizing the visible traces of Tom's war, he acknowledges one of his own in his "great affection for holes. They make me feel safe . . . and they keep me insulated." He offers no equivalent explanation for the furtive concealment of his Military Cross and Tom who talks more easily of his failed marriage than his service record does not ask. To read the characters as pure alternatives to one another, however, misses the point that for all of the film's reflecting and doubling, it is far more interested in collapsing boundaries than drawing them. Not for nothing does Moon have a habit of springing over the wall of the churchyard like some pagan intrusion from the fields beyond while Alice suffers a recurring nightmare of "the trees . . . closing in and there are only the walls to stop them." Nowhere in these green and pleasant moors and meadows is really untouched by the war when any stranger's house can contain the reminder of a lost son in uniform, any day's excursion into town derail in an encounter with another veteran. Ironically, naturally in light of the film's concern for the unfinished and open-ended, the strongest evidence that Moon and Alice do not represent such radically different spheres can be found in Tom's response to their oblique, respective offers: the moves he doesn't make. His bittersweet toast to a morning brew-up defines the shape of days to come as much as the answer he doesn't give in the bell-loft. And yet A Month in the Country does not feel like a story of missed opportunities, a restrained and tactful review of repression in a land of lost content. If we accept that Oxgodby is neither heaven nor hell but that famous space in between which is merely the world, then the dominant mode of the summer is neither nostalgia nor regret but something more ambiguous, a charmed space that I am gravely tempted to call, with apologies to José Esteban Muñoz, a field of possibility. Within it, the touchstones of the past can be recovered to scaffold a future worth going on with. If the process is never so neat or complete for walls as well as people, it is all the more true.
A Month in the Country encourages its audience to read it archaeologically, so that we learn about its living characters in the same imperfect, transformative way as they reconstruct the lives and artifacts of the dead; it is remarkable for the sense of intimacy it creates with people about whom we often don't know the most conventional, biographical facts. They are the evidence of their time, as much a part of the stratigraphy of the war that did not end all wars as the iron harvest or the planting of Portland stone. What fragments break through to the light are as likely to signify absence as persistence. Tom's nightmare memory of floundering through flooded mud and barbed wire leaves no question of the Western Front, but we have no idea if he was a volunteer or a conscript, which battles he fought in, whether he was normally demobbed or shipped home as a casualty, twitching and stammering, crying out the name of his wife who might have left him before, during, or after, we aren't told. From his expertise with the art and architecture of medieval churches, we might assume that religion drew him to his field, but the sound of vespers at the end of a day full of reminders of faith and mortality triggers him to a furiously raw-throated scream of "God? What God? There is no God!" Earlier he watched the services from his aerie with the ironic eye of an already fallen sparrow, marking what was not done to catch it. Dropped himself into the pulpit, he speaks not of sin or salvation but of his secular, restorative work as "the servant of the painter," coaxing out of its centuries of smutch and lime a masterwork whose vision of the world he doesn't share. "When I look at it—when I'm working on it—I believe in his belief." It's more than the literary trick of catching the right facets of the three-dimensional illusion; it throws into relief the private realities we will never have access to, out of which the flash of a disclosure means all the more. Moon is so disarmingly upfront about his war trauma, a past master otherwise of carelessly erudite light comedy, it's as unsurprising a jolt as a near-slip into a trench in a civilian field to discover that he got the worst of it not from the fighting that earned him his unstoried MC, but after his court-martial when he could only imagine what must have been happening to his men at the front, at least one of whom still reviles him for "sit[ting] out the last six months of the war in a glasshouse . . . for buggering his batman." The fact that he's flirting at all with another man, even so elliptically and chastely, looks suddenly like tremendous defiance. It is poignant as opposed to merely factual to see among his belongings a trunk still lettered "Capt. James Moon, 18th Norfolk Artillery." Even the vicar can be modified from the cold Christian uncharity of his introduction when we reencounter him at home, startled at his violin practice in the oppressive, echoing, unfilled rooms of the vicarage, uncertainly sensitive to every bland, revealing remark of his wife's that chimes their cracked marriage. In its light, she looks less restful, more attainable, perhaps even less innocent as her interactions with Tom cross the border from instinctive pleasure in congenial company into a kind of half-guessing romance, less playful than Moon throwing a mock-courtly kiss from his campstool and receiving a flippant salute from Tom in return. Caught by his gaze through a tea-shop window, Alice bites into an apple from a market stall as though it is the first one in the garden of the world. No one in this story is uncomplicated, no matter how it confounds our relationship to them. History is rather the same way.
As Tom correctly guesses on his first night in Oxgodby, the wall painting he has been hired to restore is a Judgment. Despite his cynical identification of its "plum spot, so the whole parish could see the God-awful things that would happen to them if they didn't fork out their tithes or marry the girls they'd got with child," he approaches its reinstatement with hauntological care; a brief, translucent swell of Verdi's Laudi alla Vergine Maria accompanies his first, delicately fingered exploration of the vacant white face of the wall, as if the Dantean past were rising to answer his touch. He uncovers first an uncompromising Christ, whom Moon associates at once with a bleakly tweaked verse of Middle English: "And he shal come with woundes rede to damn the quikke and the dede." Gradually, painstakingly, with the recovery of his own trust and skill, his work with soft cloth and lancet frees the whole sweep of the doom from hellmouth to angels, but the film's attention comes to focus on the damned of the composition, in particular the horror-faced figure of a man falling into the clutches of demons, his fair hair comet-streaming, his forehead crescent-scarred. It looks in the twentieth century like a portrait, which makes it an enigma in an era when even a painter putting his sweat, his soul, and eventually, Tom believes, his life into his "great work" wouldn't have signed his name to it. In the meantime, Moon is cheerfully documenting his "major discovery" of a seventh-century basilica underlying his field, not precisely shirking but spinning out his actual job of locating the grave of Piers Hebron, the mysterious ancestor of the heritage-minded Miss Hebron of whom nothing more is known than his dates and his excommunication. The film has accustomed its audience sufficiently to loose ends that we are prepared for his story, like the last unfinished patch of the painting or the riddle of the falling man, to have dissolved long ago in the vagaries of time. Instead they dovetail at the last smoldering moment of summer in the unearthing of a stone coffin whose lid is engraved solely miserrimus—"'I of all men the most wretched.' They really had it in for the poor devil, didn't they?" The reason is supplied by the gold chain tangled among the dust and bones, the gold crescent glinting in Moon's hand, the bright original of the painted man's dark scar. "Piers was a Muslim. A Muslim in Oxgodby!" He's delighted, and he has every right to be. Far from consolidating some conservative legacy of village-green Englishness, the archaeological efforts instigated by Miss Hebron have reopened a scandal as old as the fifteenth century, literally whitewashed out of history until the very completeness of its cover-up worked to draw the pieces of the truth together again. In contrast to the novel, the film offers no suggestion that this troublesome find will be suppressed. Moon could be speaking for the present of Oxgodby as well as its past when he laughs, "Imagine the ruction when he turned up here and still worshipping to the East!"
With its rural, historical setting and its concern for returning veterans of the Great War, A Month in the Country can look like a heritage film on a shoestring, but it is not at all reactionary about what its Britain inherits. "We'll always be different, won't we, the whole lot of us?" Moon muses over a pint with Tom, for once not speaking between the lines at all. "Different, I mean, from the generations who went before who had no idea that anything like that could ever happen." He isn't wrong in the sense that however the last century has revised our understanding of world wars, the memorial, societal rupture of this one was more than national myth. Nonetheless, there before them in the material facts of bones and inscription and pendant and paint is the evidence of a man who went off to war long before 1914 and came back different, not a recruiting poster for the rightness of the crusade but an uncomfortable reminder of otherness, so unforgivable that his own family hid him nameless in unconsecrated ground, leaving the painter to blazon the secret in the village's spiritual heart, a once-favored son consigned to hell with the emblem of his faith. Early in the process of restoration, it puzzled Tom that the falling man "was covered over years before the rest." One may imagine the Hebrons of 1430 doing everything in their power to expunge their black sheep from the record. No wonder Moon, linked to this subversive figure by his name as well as his heroism and disgrace, savors the revelation, but it is not as though Tom has not been estranged by his trauma, too. His stammer eases as the summer agrees with him, his hands regain their steadiness, even his silences take on a quality of reserve rather than impediment, but it would be naive to suppose that his recovering present could ever heal into its uninjured past any more than the last five centuries fall like scales from a war-wrung modern world. He sometimes makes the mistake himself. Shattered by a stress reaction out of a moment so beautiful, it almost bridged the hot, still distance between himself and Alice, Tom retreats from the scene with rough self-disgust: "Yes, well, that's what comes of believing in paradise!" By the end of the film, he will know better. The grace held out by A Month in the Country is temporal, in the truest sense. Time is where its characters find their own levels, their ghosts that walked this way before them. "I tell myself it'll get better as time passes and it sinks further back," Moon describes his experience of living with trauma, "but it's got nowhere to sink to, has it?" It's an image of folk horror out of T. S. Eliot, the eternal, unredeemable present where nothing can be lost even if you want it to. But its other face is two soldiers sleeping in the earth of the same field until they should rescue one another from erasure and shame. It is the meeting of an atheist art restorer and an artist who could paint hell and Christ like things that could be grasped and felt in the tactile, interactive strata of red ochre, distemper, and alcoholic solution of hydrochloric acid. It is the capacity for touching through time that we finally wish for the Reverend Keach, out of joint in his faith and lamenting with bitter frustration, "I've yet to meet the man whose hair rose at the nape of his neck because he was about to taste the blood of his dying Lord," not yet understanding that a communication of just that numinous terror has been waiting half a millennium on the wall above his altar. It is the haunting that Alice promises to make of herself, that without dying she does. It is consolatory, disturbing, and transcendent, indifferent to memory and deeper than history, and it reaches its apex in the final scene of the film, which goes beyond the retrospective frame of the novel into the realm of the once and future.
It happens just as Tom is leaving Oxgodby, having one way or another made his farewells—Keach in a moment of difficult honesty, Alice uncomforted with apples, Moon looking incongruously professional and a little less revenant-like in civilian tweeds. So much has been left unsaid between all of them. Anything else would have belonged to the space of actuality. With his battered straw fish-bass under his arm and the rest of his kit slung for the long walk to the station, Tom is turning at the gate for one last look at the church in the bright overcast of birdsong when he catches sight of a tall old man (David Garth) with stick, hat, and raincoat making to go in. Perhaps we detect a likeness in his manner of dress or his whitened mustache, perhaps we note only that he is carrying the same blue-covered Banister Fletcher in which he once pressed the heavy white rose that Alice gave to him with a caution for the thorns. They look at one another for a moment, then continue on their respective ways, the young man across the brightening fields, the old one into the cool, dust-flecked stillness of the church. If we had any doubts as to his identity, they are dispelled by the cue of the Sanctus from Schubert's Deutsche Messe which swept its timeless heilig, heilig, heilig over the nightmare of the trenches and rises now over his slow, shining survey of the Judgment in all its lime-cracked, time-flaked, never again forgotten majesty, the damned among bones and fires, the rainbow where Christ sits enthroned, the calm ranks of the saints and the blessed, unencumbered by the scaffolding which we have never seen it without, decades and decades ago, or not. Er, der nie begonnen, Er, der immer war . . . The echoes of the stationmaster's children begin to move in the aisles as if inscribed like one of their own records on the air suffused with glass-stain gold. Tom follows them into its light, which could be eternity or merely afternoon. Outside, still thoughtfully, he chews on one of the small, russeted apples from Alice Keach. All of a sudden, it is dizzyingly, perfectly possible that we are not witnessing a presentiment of the future or a recollection of the past but a total dissolution of distinctions of time. It is conventional that Tom should see his younger self, as might anyone looking back across the years. It is so much more wonderful and strange that his younger self should see him. It means we have not been caught up into memory or even a double exposure of time considered residually: for the beat of a threshold, it is the living year 1920, and the living year, say, 1965, and both are equally true. Hence it feels correct that the film does not close on the older man, as if wrapping the narrative into an epilogue of the "real" present, but remains with his younger self, striding away across the fields and folds which hardly look any different in 1986, for that matter. Whatever we have just observed, it wasn't metaphor. However poetically, it assures us of Tom in future. The mystery solved by the end of the summer is the beginning, at least, of how to be alive.
The patterning in this movie is so easy to rhapsodize about, I don't want to overlook everything else. Spare and eloquent, the screenplay by Simon Gray substantially rearranges the events of the novel without confusing its themes, condensing and juxtaposing to crystalline effect. The cinematography by Kenneth MacMillan got around one of the wettest summers of the decade to produce an almost impossible investment of everything from the canvas of a tent to the interior stones of a church with a summer-white glow. The score for string orchestra sounds so much like English classical music of the period that it took recourse to the internet for me to discover that Howard Blake was not only not a contemporary of Elgar or Vaughan Williams, but actually famous for The Snowman (1982). The Judgment was executed by Margot Noyes and it stands up to the reverence the narrative accords it, especially when seen at last in its full, celestial, infernal ornament. Oxgodby itself was impersonated by Radnage, Buckinghamshire. The performances may be equally transplanted, but all of them puzzle into place as cleanly or as jaggedly as required, from the feral enthusiasm of Kathy and Edgar Ellerbeck (Vicki Arundale and Martin O'Neil), lugging their dad's Victrola into the nave and winding it up to serenade the summer with the accidental motif of "Roses of Picardy," to the drifting vagueness of Colonel Hebron (Richard Vernon), shambling across the landscape, the last of his line. Meaning no insult to either of the leading men, I was less surprised by Firth. I have seen him in roles as weird and wounded as Tom Birkin; I have not seen much of Branagh before he became a national institution. As Moon, he looks sometimes like a sturdy, shortish, fair-haired man often shrugged out of his braces and now and then sporting an antediluvian tweed hat, and sometimes as preternaturally beautiful as a genius turned up from a field, his long quizzical mouth so habitually smiling that seriousness can make him look like a stranger, earth-stained and tow-headed as tasseled grass. One of Colpeper's children, testifying to the queerness of time. Or perhaps I am just prejudiced in favor of characters who can say of themselves, whimsically and realistically, "I went a little bit round the bend, you know? Always will be, I expect."
In a superb instance of carrying the metafiction too far, within two decades of its release the film of A Month in the Country had been effectively lost and was recovered only through the persistence of fans who located the surviving 35 mm prints; since I do not expect to catch one of those in theaters any time soon, I have just bought the BFI Blu-Ray/DVD. I would screen it in the same series as Penda's Fen (1974) and A Canterbury Tale (1944). The novel reminded me of A. E. Housman, but the film reminded me of Alan Garner. There's such deep, ambivalent weirdness in its anchorage of the past, always more beneath the scratched surface. This belief brought to you by my affectionate backers at Patreon.
The plot is established so simply, it can be mistaken for scenery. In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin (Colin Firth) arrives in the village of Oxgodby, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, to undertake the restoration of a late medieval mural long since limewashed over in a local church. The field on the other side of the churchyard is the site of a similar exercise on the part of James Moon (Kenneth Branagh), the finding of an excommunicate's grave. Both men are veterans, their antiquarian commissions fulfilling the bequest of the late Miss Hebron, much to the disapproval of the Reverend J. G. Keach (Patrick Malahide) who mistrusts scholar-soldiers and their disturbances of the past, whether that means the distractions of the fifteenth century or the tremors and nightmares of the Western Front, but Alice Keach (Natasha Richardson) brings a traveling rug to the dark-haired stranger sleeping like a church grim in her husband's bell-loft. She introduces him to her roses, the great creamy ones that bloom just until autumn: "So you'll know when summer's ended because I usually wear one of the last in my hat." By then, we will know the change of seasons by other things, secrets working their way to the surface like shells, understandings left to lie like a subsidence in the grass, the pattern that has settled out of gramophone records and mugs of tea and the cacophony of a pedal organ and the silence of a violin as powerfully and incompletely as the excavation of a basilica or the reemergence of a fresco. It is emphatically not a film in which nothing happens, however glancing or extraneous it may seem at the time; the narrative is extraordinarily concentrated for how crowded it doesn't feel. It is a film where as much matters in the lacunae as in the action. Nothing comes out of time as it went in, not personal histories or cremation jars. As Tom explains his fragile, responsible work, "One dab too few and some poor chap won't get back from five centuries ago. One dab too many and—wiped him out forever." We hold none of it whole, not even ourselves. We shore our fragments among the ones we find and go on.
It is not an idyllic film; it is not an elegiac one, either; it has exactly the heat-stunned, languorous timelessness of high summer that will clarify one sudden morning into the turn of fall, but not yet. Days pass in a milk-haze of light so thick and heady, it seems always on the verge of gathering to a storm such as broke over Tom as he trudged his first dismal way from the station to the church, a tall threadbare figure overburdened with his meager possessions and the shell-shock stammer that clicks like a jammed trigger in his throat, but like so much else in this picture the weather remains in a curious state of anticipation, a liminal suspension where if nothing changes, then everything might. Even the triangle that begins to form between the three principals does so almost invisibly, like cropmarks coming out in the field-crisping heat; it is left to the audience as much as Tom to map the potential meanings of an invitation to a foxhole, the promise of a haunting, the gift of a bag of Ribston Pippins or a packet of Woodbines. The film departs from its source material in presenting both the vicar's wife and the archaeologist as romantic options for its dislocated hero, but it's stronger for the scrupulous balance it maintains between them, contrasting and paralleling their attractions and complications until it begins to feel as though it would be unfair to accept one and not the other, a kind of photonegative OT3. Appearing out of a nimbus of sun between green leaves like a pre-war, even pre-lapsarian reverie, Alice with her wild thing's stillness and her half-shy smile seems to embody the peace of a countryside that was never churned like a soldier's psyche with broken men and horses and mud. "No, you shouldn't," Tom says firmly when she tries to extend her imaginative sympathy from the painted torments of medieval hell to the hell on earth she can glimpse without comprehending through the darkened windows of his eyes, "I'd rather you didn't." With her roses and her apples and the deep-tangled, sun-shafted wood grown right up to the door of the vicarage, she looks like the respite of the land itself, an Arthurian consolation for a fisher king's wounds. No such projections of innocence attend Moon, who appears the better-adjusted of the two veterans—bumptious, gregarious, indefatigably sunny—to anyone who doesn't sleep within earshot of his night terrors. He still wears his service jacket, ghost-ranked by its missing insignia; he sleeps in a trench dug as neatly as a reenactment, though especially with its trodden tarpaulins and the bell-tent pitched over it, it looks just as eerily like an excavation site. Recognizing the visible traces of Tom's war, he acknowledges one of his own in his "great affection for holes. They make me feel safe . . . and they keep me insulated." He offers no equivalent explanation for the furtive concealment of his Military Cross and Tom who talks more easily of his failed marriage than his service record does not ask. To read the characters as pure alternatives to one another, however, misses the point that for all of the film's reflecting and doubling, it is far more interested in collapsing boundaries than drawing them. Not for nothing does Moon have a habit of springing over the wall of the churchyard like some pagan intrusion from the fields beyond while Alice suffers a recurring nightmare of "the trees . . . closing in and there are only the walls to stop them." Nowhere in these green and pleasant moors and meadows is really untouched by the war when any stranger's house can contain the reminder of a lost son in uniform, any day's excursion into town derail in an encounter with another veteran. Ironically, naturally in light of the film's concern for the unfinished and open-ended, the strongest evidence that Moon and Alice do not represent such radically different spheres can be found in Tom's response to their oblique, respective offers: the moves he doesn't make. His bittersweet toast to a morning brew-up defines the shape of days to come as much as the answer he doesn't give in the bell-loft. And yet A Month in the Country does not feel like a story of missed opportunities, a restrained and tactful review of repression in a land of lost content. If we accept that Oxgodby is neither heaven nor hell but that famous space in between which is merely the world, then the dominant mode of the summer is neither nostalgia nor regret but something more ambiguous, a charmed space that I am gravely tempted to call, with apologies to José Esteban Muñoz, a field of possibility. Within it, the touchstones of the past can be recovered to scaffold a future worth going on with. If the process is never so neat or complete for walls as well as people, it is all the more true.
A Month in the Country encourages its audience to read it archaeologically, so that we learn about its living characters in the same imperfect, transformative way as they reconstruct the lives and artifacts of the dead; it is remarkable for the sense of intimacy it creates with people about whom we often don't know the most conventional, biographical facts. They are the evidence of their time, as much a part of the stratigraphy of the war that did not end all wars as the iron harvest or the planting of Portland stone. What fragments break through to the light are as likely to signify absence as persistence. Tom's nightmare memory of floundering through flooded mud and barbed wire leaves no question of the Western Front, but we have no idea if he was a volunteer or a conscript, which battles he fought in, whether he was normally demobbed or shipped home as a casualty, twitching and stammering, crying out the name of his wife who might have left him before, during, or after, we aren't told. From his expertise with the art and architecture of medieval churches, we might assume that religion drew him to his field, but the sound of vespers at the end of a day full of reminders of faith and mortality triggers him to a furiously raw-throated scream of "God? What God? There is no God!" Earlier he watched the services from his aerie with the ironic eye of an already fallen sparrow, marking what was not done to catch it. Dropped himself into the pulpit, he speaks not of sin or salvation but of his secular, restorative work as "the servant of the painter," coaxing out of its centuries of smutch and lime a masterwork whose vision of the world he doesn't share. "When I look at it—when I'm working on it—I believe in his belief." It's more than the literary trick of catching the right facets of the three-dimensional illusion; it throws into relief the private realities we will never have access to, out of which the flash of a disclosure means all the more. Moon is so disarmingly upfront about his war trauma, a past master otherwise of carelessly erudite light comedy, it's as unsurprising a jolt as a near-slip into a trench in a civilian field to discover that he got the worst of it not from the fighting that earned him his unstoried MC, but after his court-martial when he could only imagine what must have been happening to his men at the front, at least one of whom still reviles him for "sit[ting] out the last six months of the war in a glasshouse . . . for buggering his batman." The fact that he's flirting at all with another man, even so elliptically and chastely, looks suddenly like tremendous defiance. It is poignant as opposed to merely factual to see among his belongings a trunk still lettered "Capt. James Moon, 18th Norfolk Artillery." Even the vicar can be modified from the cold Christian uncharity of his introduction when we reencounter him at home, startled at his violin practice in the oppressive, echoing, unfilled rooms of the vicarage, uncertainly sensitive to every bland, revealing remark of his wife's that chimes their cracked marriage. In its light, she looks less restful, more attainable, perhaps even less innocent as her interactions with Tom cross the border from instinctive pleasure in congenial company into a kind of half-guessing romance, less playful than Moon throwing a mock-courtly kiss from his campstool and receiving a flippant salute from Tom in return. Caught by his gaze through a tea-shop window, Alice bites into an apple from a market stall as though it is the first one in the garden of the world. No one in this story is uncomplicated, no matter how it confounds our relationship to them. History is rather the same way.
As Tom correctly guesses on his first night in Oxgodby, the wall painting he has been hired to restore is a Judgment. Despite his cynical identification of its "plum spot, so the whole parish could see the God-awful things that would happen to them if they didn't fork out their tithes or marry the girls they'd got with child," he approaches its reinstatement with hauntological care; a brief, translucent swell of Verdi's Laudi alla Vergine Maria accompanies his first, delicately fingered exploration of the vacant white face of the wall, as if the Dantean past were rising to answer his touch. He uncovers first an uncompromising Christ, whom Moon associates at once with a bleakly tweaked verse of Middle English: "And he shal come with woundes rede to damn the quikke and the dede." Gradually, painstakingly, with the recovery of his own trust and skill, his work with soft cloth and lancet frees the whole sweep of the doom from hellmouth to angels, but the film's attention comes to focus on the damned of the composition, in particular the horror-faced figure of a man falling into the clutches of demons, his fair hair comet-streaming, his forehead crescent-scarred. It looks in the twentieth century like a portrait, which makes it an enigma in an era when even a painter putting his sweat, his soul, and eventually, Tom believes, his life into his "great work" wouldn't have signed his name to it. In the meantime, Moon is cheerfully documenting his "major discovery" of a seventh-century basilica underlying his field, not precisely shirking but spinning out his actual job of locating the grave of Piers Hebron, the mysterious ancestor of the heritage-minded Miss Hebron of whom nothing more is known than his dates and his excommunication. The film has accustomed its audience sufficiently to loose ends that we are prepared for his story, like the last unfinished patch of the painting or the riddle of the falling man, to have dissolved long ago in the vagaries of time. Instead they dovetail at the last smoldering moment of summer in the unearthing of a stone coffin whose lid is engraved solely miserrimus—"'I of all men the most wretched.' They really had it in for the poor devil, didn't they?" The reason is supplied by the gold chain tangled among the dust and bones, the gold crescent glinting in Moon's hand, the bright original of the painted man's dark scar. "Piers was a Muslim. A Muslim in Oxgodby!" He's delighted, and he has every right to be. Far from consolidating some conservative legacy of village-green Englishness, the archaeological efforts instigated by Miss Hebron have reopened a scandal as old as the fifteenth century, literally whitewashed out of history until the very completeness of its cover-up worked to draw the pieces of the truth together again. In contrast to the novel, the film offers no suggestion that this troublesome find will be suppressed. Moon could be speaking for the present of Oxgodby as well as its past when he laughs, "Imagine the ruction when he turned up here and still worshipping to the East!"
With its rural, historical setting and its concern for returning veterans of the Great War, A Month in the Country can look like a heritage film on a shoestring, but it is not at all reactionary about what its Britain inherits. "We'll always be different, won't we, the whole lot of us?" Moon muses over a pint with Tom, for once not speaking between the lines at all. "Different, I mean, from the generations who went before who had no idea that anything like that could ever happen." He isn't wrong in the sense that however the last century has revised our understanding of world wars, the memorial, societal rupture of this one was more than national myth. Nonetheless, there before them in the material facts of bones and inscription and pendant and paint is the evidence of a man who went off to war long before 1914 and came back different, not a recruiting poster for the rightness of the crusade but an uncomfortable reminder of otherness, so unforgivable that his own family hid him nameless in unconsecrated ground, leaving the painter to blazon the secret in the village's spiritual heart, a once-favored son consigned to hell with the emblem of his faith. Early in the process of restoration, it puzzled Tom that the falling man "was covered over years before the rest." One may imagine the Hebrons of 1430 doing everything in their power to expunge their black sheep from the record. No wonder Moon, linked to this subversive figure by his name as well as his heroism and disgrace, savors the revelation, but it is not as though Tom has not been estranged by his trauma, too. His stammer eases as the summer agrees with him, his hands regain their steadiness, even his silences take on a quality of reserve rather than impediment, but it would be naive to suppose that his recovering present could ever heal into its uninjured past any more than the last five centuries fall like scales from a war-wrung modern world. He sometimes makes the mistake himself. Shattered by a stress reaction out of a moment so beautiful, it almost bridged the hot, still distance between himself and Alice, Tom retreats from the scene with rough self-disgust: "Yes, well, that's what comes of believing in paradise!" By the end of the film, he will know better. The grace held out by A Month in the Country is temporal, in the truest sense. Time is where its characters find their own levels, their ghosts that walked this way before them. "I tell myself it'll get better as time passes and it sinks further back," Moon describes his experience of living with trauma, "but it's got nowhere to sink to, has it?" It's an image of folk horror out of T. S. Eliot, the eternal, unredeemable present where nothing can be lost even if you want it to. But its other face is two soldiers sleeping in the earth of the same field until they should rescue one another from erasure and shame. It is the meeting of an atheist art restorer and an artist who could paint hell and Christ like things that could be grasped and felt in the tactile, interactive strata of red ochre, distemper, and alcoholic solution of hydrochloric acid. It is the capacity for touching through time that we finally wish for the Reverend Keach, out of joint in his faith and lamenting with bitter frustration, "I've yet to meet the man whose hair rose at the nape of his neck because he was about to taste the blood of his dying Lord," not yet understanding that a communication of just that numinous terror has been waiting half a millennium on the wall above his altar. It is the haunting that Alice promises to make of herself, that without dying she does. It is consolatory, disturbing, and transcendent, indifferent to memory and deeper than history, and it reaches its apex in the final scene of the film, which goes beyond the retrospective frame of the novel into the realm of the once and future.
It happens just as Tom is leaving Oxgodby, having one way or another made his farewells—Keach in a moment of difficult honesty, Alice uncomforted with apples, Moon looking incongruously professional and a little less revenant-like in civilian tweeds. So much has been left unsaid between all of them. Anything else would have belonged to the space of actuality. With his battered straw fish-bass under his arm and the rest of his kit slung for the long walk to the station, Tom is turning at the gate for one last look at the church in the bright overcast of birdsong when he catches sight of a tall old man (David Garth) with stick, hat, and raincoat making to go in. Perhaps we detect a likeness in his manner of dress or his whitened mustache, perhaps we note only that he is carrying the same blue-covered Banister Fletcher in which he once pressed the heavy white rose that Alice gave to him with a caution for the thorns. They look at one another for a moment, then continue on their respective ways, the young man across the brightening fields, the old one into the cool, dust-flecked stillness of the church. If we had any doubts as to his identity, they are dispelled by the cue of the Sanctus from Schubert's Deutsche Messe which swept its timeless heilig, heilig, heilig over the nightmare of the trenches and rises now over his slow, shining survey of the Judgment in all its lime-cracked, time-flaked, never again forgotten majesty, the damned among bones and fires, the rainbow where Christ sits enthroned, the calm ranks of the saints and the blessed, unencumbered by the scaffolding which we have never seen it without, decades and decades ago, or not. Er, der nie begonnen, Er, der immer war . . . The echoes of the stationmaster's children begin to move in the aisles as if inscribed like one of their own records on the air suffused with glass-stain gold. Tom follows them into its light, which could be eternity or merely afternoon. Outside, still thoughtfully, he chews on one of the small, russeted apples from Alice Keach. All of a sudden, it is dizzyingly, perfectly possible that we are not witnessing a presentiment of the future or a recollection of the past but a total dissolution of distinctions of time. It is conventional that Tom should see his younger self, as might anyone looking back across the years. It is so much more wonderful and strange that his younger self should see him. It means we have not been caught up into memory or even a double exposure of time considered residually: for the beat of a threshold, it is the living year 1920, and the living year, say, 1965, and both are equally true. Hence it feels correct that the film does not close on the older man, as if wrapping the narrative into an epilogue of the "real" present, but remains with his younger self, striding away across the fields and folds which hardly look any different in 1986, for that matter. Whatever we have just observed, it wasn't metaphor. However poetically, it assures us of Tom in future. The mystery solved by the end of the summer is the beginning, at least, of how to be alive.
The patterning in this movie is so easy to rhapsodize about, I don't want to overlook everything else. Spare and eloquent, the screenplay by Simon Gray substantially rearranges the events of the novel without confusing its themes, condensing and juxtaposing to crystalline effect. The cinematography by Kenneth MacMillan got around one of the wettest summers of the decade to produce an almost impossible investment of everything from the canvas of a tent to the interior stones of a church with a summer-white glow. The score for string orchestra sounds so much like English classical music of the period that it took recourse to the internet for me to discover that Howard Blake was not only not a contemporary of Elgar or Vaughan Williams, but actually famous for The Snowman (1982). The Judgment was executed by Margot Noyes and it stands up to the reverence the narrative accords it, especially when seen at last in its full, celestial, infernal ornament. Oxgodby itself was impersonated by Radnage, Buckinghamshire. The performances may be equally transplanted, but all of them puzzle into place as cleanly or as jaggedly as required, from the feral enthusiasm of Kathy and Edgar Ellerbeck (Vicki Arundale and Martin O'Neil), lugging their dad's Victrola into the nave and winding it up to serenade the summer with the accidental motif of "Roses of Picardy," to the drifting vagueness of Colonel Hebron (Richard Vernon), shambling across the landscape, the last of his line. Meaning no insult to either of the leading men, I was less surprised by Firth. I have seen him in roles as weird and wounded as Tom Birkin; I have not seen much of Branagh before he became a national institution. As Moon, he looks sometimes like a sturdy, shortish, fair-haired man often shrugged out of his braces and now and then sporting an antediluvian tweed hat, and sometimes as preternaturally beautiful as a genius turned up from a field, his long quizzical mouth so habitually smiling that seriousness can make him look like a stranger, earth-stained and tow-headed as tasseled grass. One of Colpeper's children, testifying to the queerness of time. Or perhaps I am just prejudiced in favor of characters who can say of themselves, whimsically and realistically, "I went a little bit round the bend, you know? Always will be, I expect."
In a superb instance of carrying the metafiction too far, within two decades of its release the film of A Month in the Country had been effectively lost and was recovered only through the persistence of fans who located the surviving 35 mm prints; since I do not expect to catch one of those in theaters any time soon, I have just bought the BFI Blu-Ray/DVD. I would screen it in the same series as Penda's Fen (1974) and A Canterbury Tale (1944). The novel reminded me of A. E. Housman, but the film reminded me of Alan Garner. There's such deep, ambivalent weirdness in its anchorage of the past, always more beneath the scratched surface. This belief brought to you by my affectionate backers at Patreon.