Film
The Long Day Closes
- Director
- Terence Davies
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 82 mins
Pretty much a sequel to his much-praised, award-winning Distant Voices, Still Lives, this 1993 drama continues Terence Davies‘s fluid and impressionistic use of his childhood memories. Gone is the violent unpredictable father of the first film. Eleven-year-old Bud (Leigh McCormack) now lives happily with his remaining family, immediate concerns being getting to the pictures as often as possible and avoiding brutal treatment at the hands of classmates and teachers alike at his new secondary school. Through ruthlessly unflattering costumes, downbeat production design and cunning use of music, Davies recreates a lost world of Brylcreem and the BBC Home Service, of nit-nurses and coalmen: a world both believable and yet utterly alien. It might lack the first film’s overwhelming intensity, and there are times when it’s so warm and fuzzy it risks slipping into parody, but it’s resolutely different and retains the power to move.
It’s back on screen in the Watershed’s Terence Davies restrospective season.
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