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.
( It was the same mystery, wasn't it? )
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.
( It was the same mystery, wasn't it? )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.
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