And Then Come the Nightjars: a gentle film about a time of crisis in British agriculture
A screen adaptation of Bea Roberts play about the aftermath of the foot-and-mouth disaster stays close to its stage origins in this simple but often affecting two-hander.
Nightjars is a warm, gentle film. But it starts with a tragedy – indeed, a massacre.
Adapted for the screen by Bea Roberts from her own play (first staged in 2015), the movie is, like the stage version, a two-hander. Though we see a good many other actors on screen, notably in the wedding reception sequence midway through the film, none of them has any audible dialogue. The only two we hear from are David Fielder as dairy farmer Michael and Nigel Andrews as local vet Jeffrey, both playing the same roles they took on stage. They were directed in the theatre production by Paul Robinson, here making his debut as a film director.
The action, which covers some twelve years, is set on Dartmoor in Roberts’s home county of Devon. It opens early in 2001, with the first major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain since 1967. The government has ordered mass killings of animals; Michael hopes Jeffrey, whom he knows well, can prevent his beloved herd being shot and burnt; but despite the farmer’s desperate pleading (“Please don’t let them take my girls!”), the worst happens. Long after, Michael is haunted by nightmare visions of his ‘girls’ gazing at him with reproachful eyes, and of their corpses hung up and incinerated.
From here on the film traces the relationship between the two men who, despite the initial horrors, become increasingly close, especially after Jeffrey moves in to help run the farm. Theirs is a companionship based on mutual affection masked by jokingly insulting banter. There’s a poignancy to it as well; by the end of the film, it’s evident that Michael, the older of the two by some decades, hasn’t got long to live – as hinted by the omen of the title. “Bad luck is nightjars,” Michael observes. “They fly silent.”
This sense of melancholy also extends to the setting, idyllic though it is. For Michael, Dartmoor born and bred, as for Jeffrey, a Home Counties outsider who’s come to love his adopted home, this countryside is all too vulnerable to the intrusive forces of change: barns converted to holiday cottages, new housing estates encroaching on former farmland. John Craine’s camerawork, along with Simon Slater’s lyrical score, evokes this quiet, threatened beauty, and Robinson draws from his two principal’s performances that convey a depth of feelings far more evident in their eyes than, for the most part, in their dialogue. Grim end-titles remind us of the scale of the foot-and-mouth disaster: nearly 10,000 farms affected, nearly 8,000 agricultural jobs lost – and 6 million animals slaughtered. The nightjars were evidently out in force.
► And Then Come the Nightjars is in select UK cinemas now.