Fleapit revisited:Akenfield.

"It's hard to live in the country in the present state of things. Your body gets pulled right back. You get a terrible urge to drink. At 3am the stick people recede, the locals get up your nose, and leather soles stick on cobblestones" - Hard Life in Country, The Fall.

A Suffolk village, a graveyard, scenes of harvesting, an appearance of a vaguely ominous motorbike gang, heavy unflattering bedclothes, ennui in extremis punctuated by the excitement of weddings and funerals, and a slightly confusing narrative in which the 1970s protagonist Tom (Garrow Shand) looks even further back in time (through the eyes of his now deceased) father.

There are a remarkably large amount of similarities between Peter Hall's Akenfield (1974) and David Gladwell's Requiem For A Village from the year after and it can be no coincidence that the Cunning Folk Film Club (at the Balham Bowls Club) curator and head honcho George Nigel Hoyle picked these two films to start off his new venture.

Based on a book by Ronald Blythe and with a cast consisting entirely of local amateurs, Akenfield has slightly more narrative thrust than Requiem For A Village but it was still, at heart, essentially a meditation on rural life in a made up Suffolk village that, even in the 1970s, still looked as if it had been rendered by the brush of John Constable. A meditation, too, on the passing of time as Massey-Ferguson tractors with the power of dozens of horses arrive in the village, cottages are earmarked for destruction, and younger men desert village life for the spoils of nearby towns.

Or even cities. London in the 1970s seems further away from the rural regions than the London of now does and the village folk who grew up before television speak in rustic and impenetrable accents and spend hard days working in the fields for a pittance before going home to the cold comforts of their hand to mouth existences.

Bread and post are delivered, vegetables grown, and the meat is shot in the fields so there seems little reason for anyone to ever leave the village. A running joke throughout the film is that Tom's grandfather once walked all the way to Newmarket (forty miles there, forty miles back) to unsuccessfully look for work as a stable boy.

It's a good story but it shouldn't be the best one of your whole life. Other men have left the village to go and fight in both the wars and have seen India, China, and Turkey. It's hard to imagine the sheer level of culture shock involved in that. Even for people growing up in a society where violence against women is rewarded with a snog (!?!) and where rams are castrated by placing hot irons on their testicles before a young shepherd boy bites them off.

The joke being that said nibbler of nuts has eaten well that day. It's a strange project for plummy Peter Hall (founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of both the National Theatre and Glyndebourne) to oversee and the only nod to highbrow culture comes in the use of Michael Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli in the soundtrack (Suffolk's own Benjamin Britten intended to write the music but suffered a heart attack). Even then Tippett's operatic composition shares (surprisingly easy) space with the folk music of Dave & Toni Arthur. Yes, Toni Arthur who later went on to present both Play School and Play Away.

Despite the plot being as loose as a Suffolk farmer's belt you do find yourself both engrossed and emotionally involved in the, mostly quite mundane, proceedings. We go from a convoy of black cars for the funeral to sunlit scenes of young farm boys skinny dipping and from backbreaking work in the fields (always accompanied by a song as if in a chain gang) to only marginally more comfortable looking charabanc trips to Southwold for a jolly day out at the seaside and, one would hope, a pint or two of Adnams!

As with Requiem for a Village, this film belongs to a genre I'm calling retro-retroism in which instead of looking at how the future looked from the past, shows how the distant past looked from the recent past. The opinions you hear are not, for the most part, as reactionary as you might expect. The disembodied voice of Tom's father advises his son to get away and not live the limited life he did, elsewhere industrial machinery and heavy plant are exalted as solutions to problems rather than castigated for taking jobs, and progress, on the whole, is seen as a good thing.

This isn't a rose tinted look back at the past but a warts'n'all consideration. The odd scene looks idyllic but I wouldn't swap my life in a city (with regular walks in the country) now for the hardscrabble lifestyle depicted in Akenfield. The past is often the past for a reason and, for the most part, things improve. The most troubling aspect of the times we're living in now is that there are far too many people who want to turn back the clock, too much regressive thought.

Akenfield's residents don't seem to think they're living in some kind of Elysian paradise and, despite the beauty of the location, it's always clear they're not. Next month at the Cunning Folk Film Club it's Andrew Kotting's 1996 film Gallivant in which the director takes a coastal trip around Britain with his eighty-five year old grandmother (Gladys) and his seven year old daughter (Eden). Time Out, in 2011, rated Gallivant the 49th best British film of all time (above 2001:A Space Odyssey, Gregory's Girl, and The Long Good Friday) so, once again, I'll be heading west to Balham. This is turning into a lovely little monthly get together.