The Irish director Pat O’Connor had already made a name for himself with adaptations of modern Irish literature, specifically William Trevor’s The Ballroom of Romance (1982) and  Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (1984). This film version of J L Carr’s 1980 novel, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker, marked a broadening of his horizons (he would go on to have a successful directorial career in America) and also an early introduction to the acting talents of Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh and Natasha Richardson.

The story centres on two World War One veterans who are employed one summer in a Yorkshire village to respectively restore a mural and find a lost grave. The metaphors for their own mental recovery from shell-shock and the revelation of secrets and the weight of the past are obvious, but the treatment is subtle and the performances of the three leads raises the film beyond a mere pastoral.

There are ironic echoes of D H Lawrence in Carr’s story: Firth’s character is called Birkin, Branagh’s is Moon (a key metaphor for the author), but this is a long way from the anxieties and passions of Women in Love, let alone Ken Russell’s ripe version of it. What is central to the short novel, and well brought out by Simon Gray’s screenplay, is the sense of limited and temporary happiness that can be wrung from small details in the face of the world’s catastrophes and the looming presence of religious judgement.

“Nothing is so tranquil as A Month in the Country, in which sorrows are laid to rest like souls in a churchyard.  Though it is spiritually uplifting, there’s the feeling of an elegy to this English soldier’s story, a conscientious tone poem set in pastoral Yorkshire after the War to End All Wars… It’s all rather Arthurian, with its chivalric hero on his spiritual quest, the atmosphere suffused, seeming to dance with once and future truths.” Rita Kempley, The Washington Post

“Permeated with a sense of isolation and regret that ultimately gives way to the comforting embrace of forgiveness, this is an unusual and unyielding film, one with the hushed fervor of a silent prayer. Like Birkin’s covered-up fresco and Moon’s long buried bones, it waits patiently for its audience, demanding that you discover it.” Eleanor Ringel, Atlanta Journal and Constitution