Dark River: Why British films have gone back to the land

The British countryside has come in from the cold. Three films in the last year have given realist grit and political edge to regions which our urban majority tend to view as idyllic backdrops. Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country sees its sullen hero cope with the responsibility of taking over his ailing father’s farm, and the relief of a relationship with a male migrant worker. Hope Dickson Leach’s The Levelling and Clio Barnard’s new release Dark River both show prodigal daughters returning to equally struggling homesteads. In the former, Clover (Ellie Kendrick) and her father dredge up love and grief in the flooded Somerset Levels; in the latter, Alice (Ruth Wilson) is stalked by memories of her Yorkshire father’s abuse.

All three protagonists are stoic to the point of being dumbstruck. All pursue hard physical labour in an economically precarious world. The Levelling and Dark River are especially striking in their similarities, as if something in the air required their making now. With gay and female heroes, too, we’re a long way from The Darling Buds of May.

The countryside’s beauty is still something this harsher new wave has to confront. Early in Dark River, Alice pauses before crossing her blighted farm’s threshold to drink in the gorgeous moorland view. “You need to understand why she would go back, despite what happened there,” Barnard says of this near-tourist board scene. “And I wanted to avoid it being picturesque in a detached, Hovis advert way. I grew up in the countryside around there, and as a kid you see it for what it is quite viscerally. You look at a dead crow nailed to a fence in the same way that you look at a stream full of reeds. It really gets under your skin, and then those representations of it where everything’s at a distance seem quite odd. I’d seen the Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman’s Jane Eyre [he also shot Dark River], and that was a representation of the Yorkshire countryside that wasn’t picturesque in a cosy way. I wanted the film to look at what it really is.”

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In a scene near Dark River’s end, Alice seems to have been absorbed into the landscape’s rain and mud, just as her brother Tom has sunk into the swampy psychic miasma of the haunted farm he’s never left. “Clio said that it was like she had brittle bones after those experiences [of abuse], and could snap,” Ruth Wilson says of her character. “And he’s become part of the farm’s furniture, and bits of him are falling off. Clio’s always trying to match that relationship of the human and the land.”

Barnard’s three feature films to date have gradually journeyed into the country. The very first image in The Arbor (2010) is a horse grazing in scrubland by Bradford’s Buttershaw housing estate. The Selfish Giant (2013) follows two young boys as they ride a scrapyard horse and cart further into Bradford’s rural hinterland, where sheep graze beneath mist-shrouded smokestacks, and a pylon electrocutes a wild horse. This borderland recalls Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), set in the then mining village of Hoyland Common, near Barnsley.

“Certainly in The Selfish Giant there’s a relationship between landscape and the boys’ lives,” Barnard agrees. “The two boys I based its characters on had this relationship with horses and the semi-rural edgelands. The Buttershaw estate is very close to beautiful moorland and fields. They’re not as divorced from each other as we might think. In The Selfish Giant there’s also something about the permanence in the structures of the gas towers and the pylons as well as the landscape, and the ephemeral nature of human life. There’s something very powerful and beautiful about it. And nature in Dark River I see as the same thing. It will stay, and we will go.”

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Like the nailed crows and reeds which starkly contrast in Barnard’s childhood memories, The Levelling offers rural poetry without romance, studding its rough, lived-in look with unexpected grace-notes: swimming hares, and a murmuration of starlings. Hope Dickson Leach needed poetic imagery to say what her stoic characters couldn’t. It came to her as a Somerset farmer recalled 2014’s floods.

“In the middle of the night,” she explains, “with an elderly parent and kids, and water up to his chest, he saw a hare swimming in the water, and he wanted to save it, even though he was getting 400 head of cattle into trucks, and tractors are drowning. And he talked about owls falling from the sky later, because there were no mice, mice who’d been running along the hedgerows before they drowned. This apocalyptic vision, really, of nature, and how important that was to the farmers. I was a total city girl. I’ve never met so many people who love the land, and who get real joy out of the animals and the landscape, and the rebirth of life on the land. I wanted to make sure that we understood that there’s a connection there that those of us who don’t live in the country have lost, and don’t understand.”

Clio Barnard’s university lecturer dad is an expert on the English romantic poets. Though that tradition of the rural sublime creeps into Dark River, she prefers a more rigorously political confrontation with a countryside where rooted tenant farmers such as Alice have been bought out en masse by mega-farms, with their land a mere commodity, often then sold on for gentrifying urbanites’ holiday homes. “It seems all arse over tit to me!” she complains. “And it goes way back to the Inclosure [sic] Acts [in the late 18th and early 19th centuries], which is where capitalism began. So Dark River is a very political film.”

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This resurgence in telling more truthful rural stories comes as Brexit shows a yawning gap between rural and urban experience. With most Britons and their politicians in cities, the farmers represented in these films are viewed with suspicious incomprehension. If the filmmakers could change anything, it’s that.

“It’s about empathy for people who don’t live the way you live,” Leach says. “Right now we live in such a divided society, that anything we can do to ask people to lose their arrogance and start thinking about the complexities of other people’s lives is a good thing. It is interesting to me that rural Britain is starting to be part of this conversation. Francis and Clio’s films are different from mine, because the Southwest is different from the North. And this is important. We’ve got to stop saying I’ve seen one country film, so I’ve seen them all. There are 700 different ways to see New York onscreen. Let’s talk about the different ways there are to see British life. We’re living in a broken society, and if you want to really investigate that you have to understand different points of view.”

“I’m glad that this rural realism seems to be emerging,” Barnard agrees, “because the situation [in the countryside] is becoming critical. And the outsiders in rural communities might now be the tenant farmers or itinerant workers in semi-industrial places like Blythe or the Thames Estuary where our food is being produced, with more than what George Monbiot calls the ornamental sheep on the pretty hillsides. That image is a delusion that makes everybody comfortable, and it’s essential we break it down.”

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The new films’ protagonists also break with the past. While Francis Lee shows a gay relationship’s quiet acceptance, Barnard parallels the British landscape’s objectification with that of Alice’s body by her abusive dad. “We make the country look beautiful as this green and pleasant land of England,” Wilson considers, “but it’s much more complex than that. And it’s the same with women. We’re put on a pedestal and objectified by men, and we’re so much more.” She ponders her character’s gender. “The farm world is male-orientated, and Alice feels slightly attacked all the time by them. She feels more free when she’s out with her sheep.”

Leach also thinks her film’s young female farmer changes its dynamic. “With the prodigal daughter instead of son, you’re immediately showing that women have their own lives. But that didn’t feel like a conscious decision, because that’s my life. It’s why it’s important to have female storytellers.”

The most interesting post-war rural films have evoked an ancient, mystic strangeness, as with the Anglo-Saxon psycho-sexual fantasia Penda’s Fen (1974), or anachronistic stubbornness, as with the documentary about a forest-dwelling, steam engine-mending Sussex family The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971). Perhaps only Peter Hall’s adaptation of Ronald Blythe’s East Anglian reverie Akenfield (1975) has an unsentimental yet loving realism akin to this year’s films. Although Leach opens The Levelling with a naked young man capering near what looks like a pagan ritual’s flames, she’s in two minds about these hints of an Old Weird England.

“The Southwest is the home of Glastonbury, and you have this feeling when you’re down there that it’s ancient, and there is fire-walking. So I did want that Bacchanal feel. When you’re creating your own fun, as people in the country tend to do, you get things people have done for years, and people pushing the boundaries and drinking a lot. But there was also something about that that I wanted to challenge, because a lot of countryside films tend to have some sense that it’s scary out there – don’t go into the woods, it’s Wicker Man territory. As fun as that is, I think it’s important to be a little less ‘other’ about the country.”

Neither Leach nor Barnard feel their films are really in a rural British cinema lineage, anyway. Leach looks instead to French middle class rural realists such as Bruno Dumont and the American Kelly Reichardt. “I wanted it to feel different to other British films,” she says. Barnard thinks of Thomas Hardy (whose most famous film adaptations, Far From the Madding Crowd [1967] and Tess [1979], have their own points to make about rural poverty and female struggle).

Ruth Wilson also looks back into literature to consider the new films’ place. “With Jane Austen, it’s about the city and image and negotiation of manners. Whereas the Brontes feel much more emotional and raw and violent and wild, and I think it’s to do with where they were. When I went up to study to play Jane Eyre in Howarth [for the 2006 BBC adaptation], I went on the moors, and you think, wow, no wonder they wrote like this. It’s so dramatic and visceral and wild, and after being stuck in this dark, dingy house they’d then walk out onto this blasted heath. So I think that’s what this country offers. We have this more structured image, and then we see this other deep, dark, wild side. That’s perhaps what’s reflected in the films we’re seeing now.”

‘Dark River’ is in cinemas from 23 February. ‘God’s Own Country’ and 'The Levelling' are on on DVD and VOD