THE film And Then Come the Nightjars (Cert. 15) is about death and resurrection: not just shuffling off this mortal coil, although that, too, but different kinds of deaths that we experience. Michael (David Fielder), a Devon farmer, recently lost his wife. The other great love is his dairy herd. Soon they will die, because it is spring 2001, the start of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Precautionary measures dictate slaughter, irrespective of whether Michael’s cows are infected. He is desolate. Epitomised here is Murray Parkes’ dictum that grief is the price we pay for love.
Jeffrey (Nigel Hastings), the local vet, is Michael’s closest friend. They engage in the rough-tongued badinage associated with male pals, remaining keenly perceptive of their respective trials and tribulations. With Jeffrey, it is, again, to do with dying: his marriage to Helen. Somehow, somewhere along the way, the stuffing has been knocked out of him, and he is substituting drink for proper meals. Michael warns him: “Eat before cider or the cider eats you.”
The death of hope, visited on both characters, was signalled earlier. While chatting, Michael hears the churring sound of nightjars. He voices the belief among countryfolk that these birds presage imminent death. First to occur is the death of friendship. Michael feels betrayed. Jeffrey, compelled to let government officials cull the stock, is seen as a Judas. “Please don’t let them take my girls!” Michael cries. Jeffrey, likewise, has had a girl of his own taken away from him when Helen absconds to Surrey with their daughter, Holly. Perhaps it is no accident that all this happens in the build-up to Easter. Both men have become dead to all the world, and all the world is dead to them.
Where does the film go from there? Well, getting to its scenes of resurrection without spoilers takes some doing. And, anyway, it all depends on what one means by resurrection. If it is restricted to being something that occurred only in first-century Jerusalem and/or what happens post-mortem, then you won’t find it here. But, as the years proceed, Michael and Jeffrey experience the risen life in victories over darkness, the kind that (while mainly tacitly expressed) Christianity considers as divine transformation of despair into glory. The pair come to recognise Dartmoor as their own particular Eden, a garden of delight. Just watch out for serpents. They are again and again drawn, despite setbacks, into a covenant of grace. Such moments include feeling summoned by church bells. They reflect on acts of worship that have enriched them. The setting reminds us that rural life isn’t the idyll that tourists and second-home visitors envisage. To each there is a season, and, significantly, the movie ends in autumn.
In contrast with many adaptations, it is hard to tell that the film began as a play of Bea Roberts, directed by Paul Robinson. They are to be applauded in transforming the theatrical into cinema. Scenery and effects that could never be replicated onstage abound in this production. And, while the focus is supremely on two lost souls, they are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses who are instruments of the peace that they come to cherish.