Film
Of Time and the City
- Director
- Terence Davies
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 74 mins
Released back in 2008, Terence Davies’s first film in eight years marks a return to the nostalgic territory of his best-known work, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, after the dreary The Neon Bible and glacially slow and dull Edith Wharton adaptation, The House of Mirth. The unwary lured by those inevitable fawning five star reviews, however, should be warned that it may strike them – as it did this dissenter – as being a boring, pompous and self-indulgent glorified TV documentary best suited to inducing a gentle slumber on BBC4.
First, the facts: using Humphrey Jennings as his inspiration, Davies has fashioned a personal, elegiac “film poem” about his native city of Liverpool. There’s very little original film, this being a collage of “found footage” (i.e. bits from ancient documentaries and newsreels) and “oral testimony” (i.e. old interviews culled from the above) strung together to a soundtrack of popular and classical music, often in ironic counterpoint, with his own voiceover narration, which is heavy on the quotations – Engels, Jung, Chekhov, etc – and gags in Latin. Swipes are taken at all the usual deserving targets, notably the Catholic Church in which Davies was raised (“It’s all lies!” he now notes, describing himself as a born-again atheist, largely because of the Church’s attitude towards homosexuality – cue: polari-laden extract from Round the Horne) and the Royal Family (“The Betty Windsor show”). We also get to see an awful lot of monochrome housewives scrubbing steps while grubby urchins play in the streets, until the slums are cleared to make room for “anything but Elysian” 60s municipal architecture. Davies’s unappetising blend of old-school socialism and cultural snobbery soon begins to grate, crusty-old-gittery taking over when he dismisses The Beatles, apparently on the grounds that John, Paul, George and Ringo “sound like a firm of provincial solicitors” (huh?) and retreats into Mahler, who promptly swamps the soundtrack.
He also has a peculiar tic of spitting out the last few words of sentences, which makes him sound rather petulant. But there’s something naggingly familiar about his narration too. Then it struck me during his eulogy to “Brighton rock as sweet as sick and gobstoppers that last until middle-age”. He’s channelling Viv Stanshall’s Sir Henry!
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in the Watershed’s Terence Davies restrospective season.
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