Delius: Song of Summer (1968)
Written and directed by Ken Rusell
Frederik Delius, the composer, who was born in Bradford and is now living blind and crippled in Grez-Sur-Loing, needs to complete just a few final pieces - ones he had begun before the illness incapacitated him completely. Eric Fenby, a Scarborough native who walks along the cliffs hearing Delius’s soft and sensitive music in his head as he watches seagulls dipping and the tides lapping, writes to Delius asking whether he can come and work with him in France. Eric’s letter is replied to by Frederik’s bespectacled wife Jenka: yes, he can come and stay for four years.
The house is sombre and strange with tasteful portraits of nude women all over the walls. Eric wishes he were not there as soon as he is. It’s unsettling: grand but minimalist, and with a darkness hanging over it that he can’t pinpoint. Jenka is abrupt and efficient, running a tight household of drifting, smoking French servants caring for Delius, who must be lifted from bed to table and is transported outside for walks via a woven chair ‘carriage’. But though Jenka seems callous as she gardens in her big hat, and matronly when she instructs Eric to return to the house any time he hears three chimes of the bell (her call is one chime, ‘the man’s’ is two), it’s clear she’s lonely. She’s a woman who has put her husband before herself for an entire lifetime. Whenever that life allows someone else to enter it, she wants to have a little control over them herself for once. So it is with Eric, “the boy”.
Though seasons must come and go, the film doesn’t bother with them: we feel that we’re in summer for all of it. The years with Eric slip by: one moment he is lost and hurt as Fred shouts out ‘TAR TAR TAR TAR’ in one monotone note and expects Eric to transcribe the composition he is ‘singing’; the next Eric has got the practise down pat but doesn’t write down anything anyway - it’s pointless, he is no longer in love with his hero. Christopher Gable, who was a ballerina, is the actor who plays Eric with impetuous believability: he feels like a boy who believes he is more intelligent than he is and is more sensitive than he realises. Max Adrian is a faff-less Delius who controls the space by sitting upright in a white suit and small, round black glasses, like a big, long, thin blind mouse. Adrian was a founding member of the RSC, and his performance is perfectly theatrical for film. It’s straightforward, fluid, and when the glasses are removed - as when Delius listens in reverie to his own music played through a gramophone with the biggest trumpet imaginable - his eyes are small dark pin lenses that let us into an entire other sphere of thought. There’s the hidden sensitivity that Eric has been seeking out in this musician, who has disappointed him in seeming so brutish and dull in real life.
The camera is wildly playful, shooting about in a frenzy one minute as Percy Grainger - a roguish neighbouring ‘sometimes’ composer - bursts into the scene with cartoonish energy, handheld and panoramic as Delius and Jenka scale enormous Norwegian mountains so that Delius can get one final look at a sunset before his sight fails completely, still and composed as it watches Eric at the piano. Ken Russell is compared to Fellini, but there’s a remoteness to Russell that there isn’t to Fellini - who is so composed and fantastical - a haphazard, casualness. Russell feels like British eccentricity: more a byproduct of true madness than something created for fun. There are thankfully no explanations in this film, no big plot points, no perfect structural moments that lead us along the narrative, not even the portrait of a troubled artist. It’s enough to be with these characters in this house. Only one mysterious moment ties up the eeriness of the situation that Eric has been living in without being able to describe why. On his way back from being abandoned on a forest track by the zany Percy Grainger, Eric bumps into the beautiful ‘Girl Next Door’. From underneath her big hat and behind a wide leaf, she tells Eric about the many women and boys who have stayed before, about the ones that Jenka and Fred used to ‘share’. Eric defends Jenka - she’s the one who lasted - but he, and we, are left with a new unease about our ‘hero’ Delius, and his sexual past.
Eric is next seen in front of one of the large nudes hanging in the house, discussing something entirely different with his mentor: religion, which Delius believes Eric should give up altogether. Delius believes that no good music will be composed in England until the church is abolished, and moans that Purcell would have composed scores for the entire bible if he could. He also believes that symphonies are superfluous, a big nonsense of notes that gets in the way of beautiful, simple, melodies. For a moment I was really with Delius on this thought.
Only at the end, once Eric has returned to Yorkshire, had a mental breakdown after attending a party with people his own age and returned again to France to be with a dying Delius, do we discover that the illness that has crippled the composer for thirty years is syphilis. It makes the frail bedbound artist even more human, and even more brutish and vile. How does Eric react? By loving him even more deeply. The hero is gone, the man remains, and this, it seems, is where the sensitivity that Eric felt was lost or invisible in Delius has been living all along: in his bodily and moral failings. Delius changes the name of the composition they have been working on to Song of Summer. Nature has been his teacher - whether that of Norway, France, Britain, or Florida - and this is his ode to the happy, brief time he spent within it before melting away into a life of darkness and isolation. Perhaps Delius’s vehemence against religion comes from the idea that it teaches us that we bring these repercussions on ourselves, that bodily punishments are reactions to our sins. Delius was a ‘sinful’ man but, as Eric comes to realise, this doesn’t negate the beauty of his compositions. Nature, via Eric, has been able to seep once more into the old composer and give him life again. Their joint song of summer will remain, long beyond Delius’s failed life, and we will interpret the piece as he wanted us to, without anything physical about him or his past behind or in front of it. Like Eric did before he knew the maker of the music, we’ll only hear the lapping waves, the dipping seagulls, the sun on the heather, and the hills rolling down into the coast.