mud and flame

Review of Penda's Fen (1974) by screenqueeen: 👍 4.5/5

HOOPTOBER 8.0 DAY 7 24 DAYS REMAIN

This is such an engrossing examination of identity in a world where children are pressured to settle where they lie in their society before a natural identity can even be formed. It's like pushing a half-baked mass into a mold and cutting the bits that don't exactly fit, or twisting them grotesquely underneath so that it looks the part from the top down, the unsightly developmental warts and tendrils smushed below an agreed-upon façade.

Stephen's focus in the film is clear as his insistence on conservatism in all things is challenged from literally the ground up. The only constant for him is the beauty and terror of the music of Sir Edward Elgar, one of Britain's finest composers. Stephen finds comfort in his works and even analyzes his Dream of Gerontius in greater detail than he lends to his schoolwork, despite seeming like a teacher's pet in the classroom.

Gerontius uses text from the poem of the same name by John Henry Newman and chronicles the journey of a pious man's death leading his soul to a place without space or time where he meets an angel who leads him to a place of judgement. He is judged in a single instant and is placed into the lake of Purgatory.

Stephen's journey is very similar to this one but continually struggles with his beliefs and convictions being met with a natural opposition that seeks not to challenge and oust him but to nurture his conflictions with a greater context of history. His father, a priest, is the perfect character to do this as he doesn't take on the traditional approach of black-and-white/good-versus-evil as a way to see and govern life.

So where does the horror lie? It's nearly as buried as the peat in the titular fen but it comes more as a realization to Stephen how aspects of life he deems either blasphemous or disgusting dwells within him, buried deep as well. It's his dreams that truly rouse him and makes him begin to question his convictions. Stephen does more than grapple with his sexual identity here. It's an entire reconfiguring of who you think you should be versus who you feel you are truly coming to be.