The Darkest Light
UK/France 1999
Reviewed by Richard Kelly
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
North Yorkshire, the present. Eleven-year-old Catherine lives with her parents, farmers Tom and Sue, and her younger brother Matthew who is ill with leukaemia. Neglected at home, Catherine misbehaves at school, slighting new schoolmate Uma. But the girls become friends, as do Tom and Sue with Uma's pregnant mother Nisha. The girls play truant on the moors, entering a military enclosure where they are startled by blinding light and tremendous noise. Catherine now reassures Matthew he will get better. Matthew decides Catherine saw the Virgin Mary.
Tom's cattle are found to be infected with foot-and-mouth disease, a fact he hoped to conceal. His herd are shot and incinerated, and locals are warned the disease will spread. Catherine's prophetic tendencies attract local gossip. When her bone marrow is found suitable for donation to Matthew, Sue starts to believe her daughter, as do other locals. Catherine and Uma return to the site of their vision, followed by an entourage. A Harrier jet flies over, elsewhere causing Nisha to fall and be taken to hospital. Matthew's operation fails, and he dies asking for the Virgin Mary; Nisha's baby is delivered at the same time. Catherine shuns Matthew's funeral, but is reconciled with her parents. She visits Uma and holds Nisha's new baby.
Review
The current vitality of French cinema has much to do with its distinctly rural, anti-metropolitan bias, redressing a long-held and tired preference for Paris. If British films are to manage a similar rejuvenation, they would be well advised to get out of London. We see so little on screen of the true English countryside and the great North other than in glutinous television shows about vets. But The Darkest Light has its feet planted foursquare in the mud of real life. Co-directors Simon Beaufoy and Bille Eltringham's film is impressively thoughtful, thoroughly humane, robust in its drama, alert to its times; one means nothing but praise in asserting it's as valuable as a vintage BBC Play for Today.
As an index to the film's worth, consider the fraught scenes when a vet from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries arrives to pronounce fateful judgement on Tom's sick cattle. Isn't it about time the MAFFia (as Private Eye calls it) showed up in a British film? As Tom watches his herd go up in smoke, we may feel the deep resonance of the catastrophe visited upon UK farming in recent years. Of course, here the affliction is the foot-and-mouth virus, not BSE; but in its depiction of rural livelihoods rent asunder, The Darkest Light shows a keen eye for what's in the air.
Some of the weighty concepts stacked up in Beaufoy's script (prophesy and dread, borders and contagion, karma and reincarnation) prove a bit harder to carry off. The twinning of surgical and liturgical themes is telegraphed early with some rather reverent overhead shots of young Matthew on the cancer-scan table. Later, Tom and the local priest argue about the warring claims of science and faith, Tom concluding that the whereabouts of God may in time be located at the end of some high-powered microscope. The co-directors have professed a curiosity about faith's endurance in the teeth of reason, but their film wraps up its proceedings a bit too neatly, with a nod to the transmigration of souls. Nevertheless, this unfashionable interest in the evidence of things not seen feels sincere and loans an intriguing aura to the piece.
The camera style is unfussy, occasionally handheld, and respectful of simple, touching, funny things: from forlorn Catherine tottering across the farmyard on roller-blades, to pregnant Nisha swigging from a can of Irn-Bru behind the cash till of her convenience store. Early on there are some elegantly portentous inserts of wind-powered turbines, and their meaning is triggered later when the man from the MAFF warns of the wind-borne virus at large. The blossoming girlish friendship of Uma and Catherine is well drawn: initially a play of looks and smiles, then a shared delight in playing silly buggers, and even a certain innocent eros as Catherine plants a kiss on Uma just before their shared vision. All the acting is splendid: one should cite the three youngsters (Keri Arnold, Kavita Sungha and Jason Walton), and make special mention of Stephen Dillane, superbly unaffected as the laconic Tom.
An especially fine scene should also be singled out. The lively mood of an evening meal at the farm is punctured when cancer-stricken Matthew, in mounting terror, starts pulling tufts of hair from his head. Immediately Tom wrenches the boy from his seat and bears him off to the shearing shed. There he takes up clippers and shaves Matthew's head clean. It's a hugely affecting sequence: the vulnerable scalp of the chemotherapy patient is a terribly plangent sight, here as in another of the year's noteworthy films, Solveig Anspach's Haut les coeurs! But then Beaufoy and Eltringham deliver another marvellous stroke: Tom stoops to his knees and says, "Your turn," proffering the clippers to his son, who gratefully gets to work. This is as sad and lovely a moment of cinema as one could wish for.
Credits
- Directors
- Simon Beaufoy Bille Eltringham
- Producer
- Mark Blaney
- Screenplay
- Simon Beaufoy
- Director of Photography
- Mary Farbrother
- Editor
- Ewa J. Lind
- Production Designer
- Chris Townsend
- Music
- Adrian Johnston
- ©Pathé Fund Limited
- Production Companies
- Pathé Pictures presents in association with the Arts Council of England/Le Studio Canal+ and BBC Films with the support of the Yorkshire Media Production Agency, a Footprints Films production
- Developed with the assistance of British Screen Finance Limited
- Supported by The National Lottery through The Arts Council of England
- Part funded by the European Regional Development Fund
- Developed in association with BBC Scotland
- Executive Producers
- Andrea Calderwood
- Alexis Lloyd
- Barbara McKissack
- Line Producer
- Guy Tannahill
- Development Executive
- Ruth McCance
- Production Executive
- BBC Scotland:
- Christine MacLean
- YMPA Executive
- Colin Pons
- Production Co-ordinator
- Lisa Lake
- Location Manager
- Christine Llewellyn-Reeve
- Post-production Supervisors
- Lisa Lake
- Helen Walker
- Assistant Directors
- Max Keene
- Matthew Baker
- Dan McGrath
- Toby Hoskins
- Script Supervisor
- Janice Schumm
- Casting
- Wendy Brazington
- Visual Effects
- Peerless Camera Co
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Kent Houston
- Visual Effects Producer:
- Susi Roper
- Digital Effects:
- Andrea Adams
- Ditch Doy
- Tim Olive
- Martin Body
- Special Effects
- Evan Green-Hughes
- Steve Breleney
- Mark Danbury
- Art Director
- Jason Carlin
- Set Decorator
- Caroline Smith
- Costume Designer
- Ffion Elinor
- Chief Make-up/Hair
- Tara Smith
- Musicians
- Village Life Music
- Violin:
- Sonia Slany
- Viola:
- Sophie Renshaw
- Cello/Viol:
- Nick Cooper
- Bass:
- Simon Edwards
- Percussion:
- Paul Clarvis
- Bouzouki/Mandolin:
- Stuart Hall
- Phonofiddle/Keyboards:
- Adrian Johnston
- Vocals:
- Melanie Pappenheim
- Conductor
- Terry Davies
- Mixer
- Steve Price
- Sound Recordist
- Aidan Hobbs
- Dubbing Mixer
- Paul Hamblin
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Danny Hambrook
- Dialogue Editor
- Graham Headicar
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Trevor Swanscott
- Foley
- Artists:
- John Fewell
- Julie Ankerson
- Mixer:
- Trevor Swanscott
- Editor:
- Kallis Shamaris
- Cultural Adviser
- Sangeeta Dale
- Animal Consultant
- Rona Brown
- Animal Wrangler
- Sue Clark
- Cast
- Stephen Dillane
- Tom
- Kerry Fox
- Sue
- Keri Arnold
- Catherine
- Kavita Sungha
- Uma
- Jason Walton
- Matthew
- Nisha K. Nayar
- Nisha
- Nicholas Hope
- Father Mark
- Alvin Blossom
- Caver
- Kathryn Hunt
- Val
- Isobel Raine
- ultra sound nurse
- Emma Palmer
- Jane
- Romy Baskerville
- form teacher
- Sophie Jewitt
- Anne Marie
- Joanna Swain
- drama teacher
- Imran Ali
- Rishi
- Emil Marwa
- Sandeep
- Paul Kynman
- Ian
- Rob Jarvis
- Dick
- Clive Mantle
- ministry vet
- Chris Brailsford
- man 1
- David Crellin
- Mike
- Stefan Escreet
- surgeon
- Jacqueline Kington
- nurse
- Connie Walker
- doctor
- Martin Reeve
- consultant
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Pathé Distribution
- 8,448 feet
- 93 minutes 52 seconds
- Dolby SR
- In Colour