Sunshine in Leith
Almost sixty years after the studio-set, Hollywood-produced musical Brigadoon defined the Scots as singin’ and dancin’ Highlanders living in a never-never land of kilts, heather and hills, Sunshine on Leith doesn’t so much correct the impression as exacerbate it, with an eye towards touristic potential as location specificity. Scotland had no feature film to call its own, according to Bill Forsyth, until his feature That Sinking Feeling in 1979, “…in terms of narrative cinema, I think That Sinking Feeling was the first indigenous Scottish feature film. There had been nothing before then.” (Mubi) This led to images of Scotland rather than Scottish images. It didn’t make the images bad (though they often were), but they were homogenous: Bonnie Prince Charlie, Kidnapped, Whisky Galore, Tunes of Glory, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Even the best of these (Alexander Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore) turned the locations it used (around Barra) into stereotypes it comedically exploited. The brilliant Wicker Man wished from Scotland little more than pagan myths, while the no less brilliant Macbeth took from Scotland its majestic medievalism as director Roman Polanski filmed in England and Wales.
Yet even now, when films are produced and at least partly funded in Scotland, the sort of predictable images international filmmakers offered in the past have become internalised by the Scots as moneymaking possibilities. In a report for the funding body Screen Scotland, it valued: “…visitor expenditure on screen tourism activities at £64.9 million. It notes that the screen tourism expenditure results in £55 million GVA (Gross Value Added) to the Scottish economy [in 2019], sustaining 1,220 full-time jobs.” The report also says Scotland has, over many years, been a beneficiary of screen tourism. “Braveheart, released in 1995, was set in Scotland and generated significant interest for tourists visiting Scotland. In recent years, the television series Outlander has garnered a strong audience following and significant interest among tourists visiting Scotland.” (‘Economic Value of the Screen Sector in Scotland in 2019’) With money like this coming in, based on images that have been perpetuated for a hundred years, why would home-grown cinema choose to do things differently?
Sunshine on Leith, about two soldiers (Davy and Ally) returning from abroad, looks like a film seeking a consumer just as much as it wishes to find an audience. While the earlier films, from before Scottish film production, made use of international perceptions of Scotland, they weren’t especially concerned with whether this manifested itself in tourist dollars. Their purpose was exclusively in making money through the film itself. Braveheart may have done wonders for the tourist industry, but it wasn’t designed with this in mind. It was a byproduct. Could the same be said of Sunshine on Leith, which offers an idyllic Edinburgh setting for an overly dramatised account of various characters living in the city?
Here we have a film serving two masters: an economically touristic expectation and a narrative imperative. Typically, one would expect these to go together: the film tells a story and, in telling it, makes cash. Yet this is something a little different. As the tourist website Edinburgh Forever says of the film: “see the film, then visit the locations!” If before the 1970s, Scotland accepted that others would represent the country on screen and often didn’t even attempt to film in Scotland, or created generalised images of the country, Scottish film producers can now see the merit of location-specificity. It offers an intriguingly troublesome combination, as if bringing together product placement with marketing spin-offs. While product placement might be Audi cars, Budweiser beers or Evian water in too many shots, and spin-off merchandise, the toys you can buy of the figures from Star Wars and so on, this is a placement that generates a spin-off as the locations used become places one ought to visit.
There are sweeping shots of Edinburgh that do little for the storytelling, but won’t hamper the Edinburgh tourist trade. Eleven minutes into the film, we have an establishing shot of the city that serves no narrative function as two of the film’s leading characters, Liz (Freya Mavor) and Yvonne, enter the pub. We have no idea where the pub happens to be, specifically, and all we know generally is that we are in Edinburgh: the film has given us plenty of shots thus far of the city. Potentially, it could have given us important information: that this is Edinburgh, rather than Leith, two separate cities before 1920. What we have mainly seen thus far is the latter, and now it is the former, as it shows the characters entering a pub in Edinburgh proper. But nothing in the film suggests this is why the shot is there. It seems gratuitously touristic: an opportunity to offer Edinburgh as beautiful at night, while the shot shows Waverley Bridge, the castle and the Scott Monument. After the pub visit, Liz’s brother Davy (George MacKay), back from soldiering in Afghanistan, and Yvonne, are up on Calton Hill, and the film offers a sweeping pan of the city that is justified by the diegesis. Yvonne thinks he is taking her up there as just another seduction attempt; Davy explains that he would often come up to clear his head. After, we cut to a daytime shot of Edinburgh, one that takes in a clock tower in the foreground and the Pentland hills in the background. The logic of the shot suggests Liz lives in the clock tower, though she doesn’t. Later, after Davy and Yvonne have a crisis, they meet on the top floor restaurant at the Point Hotel, which again offers a view of the castle and other parts of the city are shown in an interior shot looking out onto the city’s vista. The shot is again motivated by the action and can justifiably show the beauty of Edinburgh within the context of the drama.
But what about a shot later on, before Liz and Davy’s Dad, Rab (Peter Mullan), pops into a book shop? The scene starts with a slow zoom into the city before cutting to a shallow focus shot of Davy on a park bench. Nothing indicates this establishing zoom is needed. Nor later, when we cut from Davy lying in a hospital bed after a heart attack, and the film then shows us a sweeping drone of Edinburgh that takes in Calton Hill, the Balmoral clock tower, the Bank of Scotland building on the mound, and the Pentland Hills in the background, before cutting to Liz waiting anxiously outside the hospital room.
If the film can feel like an advert for the city, then it appears no less a drama predicated on constant event. If adverts are there to sell a product, a story is there to engage us for rather longer than thirty seconds. Yet this doesn’t mean a film has constantly to generate the dramatic, and the determination to do so can sometimes leave us not in a filmic world, but a soap opera one, with the story shifting from one character to another as it seeks the situation containing the most narrative excitement. Over a few days, we have: Liz and Ally breaking up after he publicly asks her to marry him, and she says no; Rab discovering he has a child from a one night stand twenty five years earlier and his wife finding out; Rab having a heart attack, Davy and Yvonne becoming a couple and splitting up twice, and Liz going off to Miami to become a nurse as she seeks more adventure than she can find at home. Scriptwriter Stephen Greenhorn is skilful enough to weave all the stories together so that there are few loose ends, but the script seems like thin lace, gossamer characterisation meeting hasty narrativization. The dramatic impetus creates the to and fro of televisual storytelling so that when Ally overhears, after his rejection, a guest making a joke about the engagement ring having a receipt, a fight ensues, and Davy gets involved too, at one moment looking as if he is about to hit Yvonne as he is lashing out all over the place. They make up only to break up again when Yvonne hypothetically wonders whether Davy would follow her to London, and he refuses initially to respond to a supposition that he sees needn’t be discussed, before getting irate and saying no.
Cue the romcom moment when Yvonne takes off to the station and Davy chases after in cross-cutting moments, playing up yet again the beauty of Edinburgh. Rab’s heart attack promptly leads not only to his wife Jean (Jane Horrocks) forgiving him, but also brings the child she never knew he had (and that he never knew he had) into the family fold. A more nuanced film might have seen this as the soul of the story — with Liz taking off to the States as Eilidh becomes a bittersweet surrogate. Instead, it is another rushed throughline that leads to a happy ending all around, but where you feel the film’s various moving parts have been jammed into position.
If the images are advertorial and the characters plot cyphers, then the film holds them together with a style that borrows chiefly from Trainspotting, Magnolia, Love Actually and Slumdog Millionaire. When a car yanks its brakes on as Davey pulls out in front of it, the adrenaline rush of Trainspotting comes to mind. When the story crosscuts with the characters singing in unison, Magnolia would seem the main influence. The general hyperlink optimism owes a little to Love Actually, while the film’s ending may well owe a debt to the train station conclusion of Slumdog Millionaire. It wouldn’t be fair to say director Dexter Fletcher steals from all these films, but a no less kind claim might be to say that of the four it shares with Love Actually a diebetically dangerous coating of sugar, and the scenes that resemble those in Trainspotting, Magnolia and Slumdog Millionaire all have more energy and ambiguity, an awareness that optimism isn’t impossible but neither can it be taken as given. Sunshine on Leith is a composite product that will please the tourist board, the lachrymose and those who prefer their stories, like their whisky, neat. Rather too neat.
© Tony McKibbin