A TRUE RENAISSANCE man, Terence Davies is a filmmaker, screenwriter, novelist, actor, and narrator. His critical status is based on the poetic autobiographical features he made in the first decade of his career. Though best known as a film director, he has also produced several radio plays, including one based on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. In 1983, he dramatized the life of his alter ego in the novel Hallelujah Now, a brutally candid account.
Despite a small output—half a dozen features in four decades—Davies is arguably Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Some critics may choose Ken Loach as the country’s premier filmmaker, but having been born in 1934, he is older than Davies and belongs to a different artistic cohort. Stephen Frears, who is more or less Davies’s age, is the most prolific and commercial of Britain’s filmmakers, but he does not qualify as a genuine auteur. Davies shares some similarities with Mike Leigh, an accomplished director who is only two years older and, being Jewish, an outsider like Davies. But as I will show later, Davies is a more significant filmmaker, using more fully the language of film as a unique medium. For starters, Leigh’s features could be done as stage plays because they are highly dependent on the characters and the actors who cocreated them, but Davies’s features can exist only as films.
Thematically, like Pedro Almodóvar and Todd Haynes, Davies has explored the lives of women in his work. Unlike Almodóvar, however, whose female protagonists are diverse and ultimately are not victims, Davies has largely depicted middle-class or working-class women who are victims of their social circumstances. His female characters are products of the rigid patriarchal British society of the 1950s, a context in which he grew up, witnessing firsthand sexual segregation and physical abuse as they prevailed in his own family.
Aware of his consistent preoccupation with certain motifs and characters, Davies said: “My films are always about outsiders. I’ve always felt like an outsider myself. I’ve never felt part of life. I’ve always felt like a spectator. I think that’s what interests me about all the people and the things that I’ve written about. Lily Bart in The House of Mirth is an outsider, and so is Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea.”1 One can easily add to that list Aunt Mae, the protagonist of The Neon Bible.
As a filmmaker, Davies is noted for dealing with some recurring themes: explorations of life’s temporal dimension and the complex relationships among past, present, and future; women’s emotional and physical suffering but also endurance; the influence of subjective memory on everyday life; and the crippling effects of paternal abuse and rigid religiosity on individuals’ welfare and happiness.
Davies’s output is small but artistically distinguished. His oeuvre consists of critically acclaimed shorts and features that are highly personal, philosophical in their concerns, coherent in their scheme, and stylized in their visual and sound design. His films represent acts of exorcism of a tormented past, but they also function as acts of redemption and renewal. “I make films to come to terms with my family history,” the director has said. “If there had been no suffering, there would have been no films.”2 But unlike other artists, he does not think that personal pain is a necessary condition for creating good films—or any art.
One of the distinctions of great artists is their ability to turn drab human existence, pain, and misery into joyous, lyrical, and sublime art. Davies exults in the power of cinema as a medium of personal transformation and redemption. He has displayed a profound understanding of how art can liberate people from their sorrow. Time in his films may be transitory and ephemeral, but he knows that his ability to capture particular historical moments in a uniquely filmic mode represents the kind of self-fulfillment associated with spiritual or even religious experiences.
Unlike other directors in this book who have occasionally collaborated with other scribes (Haynes, Almodóvar) or who have relied on scripts by other writers (Gus Van Sant), Davies has always been the sole screenwriter of his films, which gives him a greater measure of authority and control. As a director, he has frequently explored gay themes via screen characters that are his alter egos. He is more concerned with reflecting on and recreating his own life than with making films about gay characters or gay issues per se. Indeed, three of his six features revolve around women, and the other three favor the female characters (on-screen mothers and sisters).
Davies has a special gift for constructing luminous visual images and resonant sounds whose power is both aesthetic and emotional. Stylistically, his works are defined by multi-nuanced texts, elaborate mise-en-scènes, symmetrical compositions, and “symphonic” narrative structures, to borrow a term from classical music, which he admires. He leaves nothing to random chance: to achieve maximal dramatic and emotional impact, his brick-a-brick strategy calls for each shot to be measured and placed in the “right” position. Similarly, each sound of his rich scores is carefully wedded to a particular image, resulting in emotional reverberation. Believing that film is the most emotional and expressive art form, he uses songs in his narratives to express his characters’ innermost feelings—often repressed and frustrated sensations.
Of the five directors in this book, Davies is the most rigorous, methodical, and subjective. Asked what he wanted to achieve in his life, he said: “Even though I’m a very pessimistic person, I believe that it’s worth striving to be a better person. Better, not better off. That’s just vanity. I want to say that it is worth going on.”3 According to his philosophy, “You are worthy because you were born, and being of service is what makes you great as a human being.”4 Davies’s films suggest that his working-class life was difficult, and even unbearable, but that it also had great beauty and genuine warmth. There is nothing intellectual about Davies’s approach to narrative construction or characterization. In sharp contrast to Haynes, there is no conscious deconstruction, no overall analytical perspective, no use of postmodernism. As Davies explained: “My point of view comes from instinct and heart. I try to be as truthful to memory as possible. I remember the intensity of those moments, which I still reverberate to even today. So I have no aesthetic distance from the material of my films.”5 His screen characters are not meant to be symbolic representations of stereotypes or prototypes. The mothers in several of his films are not the self-sacrificing type, and Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea does not stand for the sexually starved, long-suffering wife as seen in Hollywood films.
It goes without saying that, commercially, Davies is the least accessible director in the book. His career is entirely dependent on critical response and festival showings. Most of his features have had their world premiere at the Cannes or Locarno Film Festival and then have been shown at the Toronto Film Festival, where he is particularly appreciated. None of his features has crossed over beyond the art houses in big metropolitan centers and the festival circuits, and he is still much better known in Europe than in the United States.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER BEGINNING
Born on November 10, 1945, in Liverpool to working-class parents, Davies is the youngest child in a family of ten children, only seven of whom had survived. Though raised Catholic by his deeply devout mother, he later rejected religion—he now considers himself an atheist. He has stated that filmmaking has helped him work out his rejection of Catholicism and views his complete devotion to film as a sacred calling, an individualized, secular religion.
The movies that his sisters took him to see as a boy had a profound influence on Davies. He recalls fondly musicals, such as MGM’s Meet Me in St. Louis and Singin’ in the Rain, admiring their vivid color, energy and vitality, exuberant life, and boisterous songs performed by the likes of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. He admits, “My teenage years and my twenties were some of the most wretched in my life. True despair. Despair is worse than any pain.”6 This period led to his leaving both Liverpool, which offered little creative outlet, and the Catholic Church, which might have damaged him irreparably.
As an adolescent, Davies saw Alec Guinness on television reciting from memory T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, a group of poems about time and memory published in 1943, two years before Davies was born. “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past,” writes Eliot, which would become a leitmotif of the director’s work in exploring how images and memories of the past, present, and future subtly interface. The poems had such a profound effect on him that “I now read them once a month.” As a young man, he also discovered the classical music of Anton Bruckner, Jean Sibelius, and Dmitri Shostakovich, whose compositions “worked deeply into my unconscious, so when I look at images, I think of music.”7
Davies has professed love for “the poetry of the ordinary” and the “beautiful in the mundane,” apparent if one observes objects and events of reality closely. This may be why he frequently quotes the last stanza of The Four Quartets, in which Eliot states the relationship between time and mortality: “All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.”
After leaving school at sixteen, Davies, just like Almodóvar, took a day job, working for years as a shipping-office clerk and accountant. As he later recalled: “Liverpool was a world I had to escape. The environs I grew up in were tiny. It consisted of house, church, street, and the movies. I wanted a creative life, rather than becoming an accountant, which I did for twelve years, and I detested it. It was like a slow death.”8
Due to funding difficulties and his refusal to compromise, Davies’s output has been small and sporadic. Of his six feature films, the first two, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, are autobiographical films set in Liverpool. The Neon Bible, starring Gena Rowlands, is an adaptation of a novel by American author John Kennedy Toole. The House of Mirth, boasting a strong performance from Gillian Anderson (then famous for TV’s The X-Files), is based on Edith Wharton’s well-respected book of the same title. His new feature Sunset Song, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1932), was to star Kirsten Dunst in the lead, but it got delayed due to financial difficulties. The film, now starring Agyness Deyn, is in post-production as of this writing.
Davies has also produced several works for radio. A Walk to the Paradise Garden, an original radio play, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2001, and a two-part radio adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2007. Intensive Care, the autobiographical radio feature Davies wrote and narrated for BBC Radio 3, was broadcast on April 17, 2010.
Like most of the directors in this book (Van Sant is the only exception), Davies has coaxed great performances from his female stars. This group includes Gillian Anderson, who proved in The House of Mirth that she is more than a TV presence, and Rachel Weisz, who won the Best Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle for The Deep Blue Sea, Davies’s 2011 feature. In the autobiographical features, there are vivid performances by the various actors, deliberately unknown, who impersonate himself and his real-life mother and siblings.
Davies told Cineaste: “I’m very black-and-white, I either feel great passion or nothing at all.”9 Though a very different director, he almost echoes John Waters, when he says, “People either love what I do or they absolutely detest it.” He even agrees with the assessment of a critic who wrote about the grim tone of his features: “Davies’ films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis.”10
PERSONAL FEATURES
Leaving Liverpool, Davies attended the Coventry Drama School, where he studied acting and wrote the screenplay for his first autobiographical short, Children (1976), financed by the BFI Production Board. He then went to the National Film School, after which he directed Madonna and Child (1980), the second chapter in the story of Davies’s alter ego, here named Robert Tucker. Several years later he completed the trilogy with Death and Transfiguration (1983), in which he dramatized, among other things, his own death. These works were screened together at film festivals (I saw them at the estimable Toronto Film Festival) as The Terence Davies Trilogy, winning numerous awards and loyal aficionados. In this austere black-and-white trilogy, he depicts himself as the closeted Robert Tucker, chronicling his life from abject childhood to miserable adulthood to lonely death.
Despite the seven years separating the first short from the last, as the critic Henderson notes, they are coherent due to their stark outlook, aesthetic formalism, and reliance on subjective memories. Like Davies’s future features, they are fragmentary and elliptical, offering in their dour tone a poignant portrait of a lifetime of suffering.
The first, Children, in which Phillip Mawdsley plays Robert Tucker as a boy, paints a picture of suffocating isolation, school bullying, and abusive parenthood. Davies displays remarkable detail in rendering Robert’s fear of undressing during health examinations in school and his shyness in the public showers, experiences that made him first aware of his attraction to men. The ordeal of Robert’s burying his head in his pillow while listening to his father beating his mother is even more painful to behold because after the assault his mother, overcoming pain and humiliation, goes up to Robert’s room to comfort him. Despite Robert’s close relationship with his mother, he doesn’t glorify her—she is depicted as an ordinary woman who loved him unconditionally. The funeral of Robert’s father provides the film’s climax, emphasizing British funerals as macabre ceremonies and grotesque rituals, especially when seen from the POV of children.
Children showed Davies’s technical inexperience as a director, which he himself later acknowledged. Nonetheless, despite the roughness and “my many mistakes,” the short still maintains raw power. Shooting it was a grueling process because none of the crew members liked Davies’s “peculiar method.” He credits cinematographer William Diver for supporting his vision and helping him complete the work.
In Madonna and Child, the second short, Davies continues to explore the issues of Catholic guilt, homosexual fantasies, his intimate rapport with his mother, and oppressive isolation. It depicts Robert as a bright young man, stuck in a wearisome, life-sucking office job. Davies displays growth in the technical aspects of directing, manifest in the high contrast of black-and-white imagery, and poignant editing, which place this short in a darker realm than that of Children. For instance, the scene in which Robert knocks on the door of a gay club is contrasted with his confession at church. Juxtaposing the sacred and the profane, we hear his voice-over requesting a tattoo on his “bollocks” while the camera sweeps the interiors of the church. Another scene juxtaposes Robert’s confession of his sins with a fellatio he performs, detailing both the pleasure and the guilt involved. The holy-profane binary motif is manifest in his homosexual fantasies, which are contrasted with his mundane office job. In one sequence, the director cuts from a domestic scene of mother and son drinking tea to a public one in which Robert is engaged in an S&M scene.
The last scene, a nightmare of Robert’s own death, echoes the morose scene of his father’s death in Children. Davies follows a procession, which leads up to a casket where Robert himself lies while the priest delivers the eulogy. Robert’s loud screaming as he wakes up offers a chilling effect. According to the director, these plaguing nightmares were caused by being forced to stay in his father’s bed after the latter died. The remaining hope, as he says in his commentary, is that he was able to “get out” and escape into professional filmmaking.
Death and Transfiguration, the third short, brings the trilogy to a transcendent closure. Wilfred Brambell plays the elderly Robert Tucker, who is now confined to the hospital after a stroke. But even though his body is broken, his mind floats freely. The film contains seamless contrasts and polar opposites. It is rooted in the pain of the flesh, but it also offers spiritual grace, reveling in the kind of hope that’s found in despair. The choirs of children singing Christian songs take on a haunting quality, and there is a subtle transition between the nurses putting up holiday decorations in the hospital and the young Robert celebrating Christmas with his mother.
Doris Day’s rendition of “It All Depends on You” opens the short with a note of sentimentality that’s quickly muted. In one long take, Davies pans from Brambell in his wheelchair to a rainy window and then back to the younger Robert (Terry O’Sullivan, reprising his role from Madonna and Child), standing by the window in his place. Shot in one take, it shows Davies’s remarkable capacity to slip smoothly between varied historical times. In the trilogy’s most harrowing moment, the director tracks through the darkened hospital as Brambell’s heavy breathing punctuates the soundtrack before cutting to him as he reaches toward a majestic light.
Distant Voices, Still Lives, made in 1988, is Davies’s first masterpiece, as reflected in its critical reputation. The Guardian described it as “Britain’s forgotten cinematic masterpiece,” and in a 2011 Time Out poll, the film ranked 3rd among the 100 greatest British films of all time. This superlative start, not evident in the careers of the other four directors, indicates the challenges for a filmmaker who begins on a high note and then has to strive to match that achievement. In my view, Davies has done it twice, with The Long Day Closes, the 1992 follow-up, and Of Time and the City, the sublime 2008 documentary.
Davies has described Distant Voices, Still Lives as “homage to my mother and to my family, “focusing on a household ruled by a tyrannical father Part warm nostalgia, part cold nightmare, and part painful memoir—and satisfying on each of these levels—the film offers a bittersweet look at Davies’s working-class upbringing in post–World War II Liverpool. The narrative structure explains the title of the film, which consists of two parts, shot separately. Essentially a dramatic musical, or a musical drama, which is a rare subgenre, the film goes against the grain of most Hollywood musicals, past and present, which are joyous, upbeat, and boisterous.
Davies’s real-life father is seen an old and bleached photograph hanging on the wall, when the mother and her three children, Tony, Eileen, and Maisie, walk out of the frame, reinforcing the notions that the film is grounded in reality and that the patriarch’s presence still is—and would always be—felt. As noted, the director was the youngest of ten children, born into a working-class, Catholic household. His father died when he was six, though memories of him as a powerful, domineering, violent man are vivid, as are his memories of the love and support of his mother. Davies has noted that the films based on his own early years represent “partial, very partial reality, particularly the bits that I am not in.” Recalling a life lived in constant, imminent terror of his father, he has said, “If I had put in everything that happened, nobody would have believed it. My father was so psychotic I had to leave a lot out. You cannot recreate the terror. The suffering was so prodigious you couldn’t put it on screen. Nobody could bear it.”11
Tommy Davies is given to erratic bursts of temper and contradictory display of emotions, ranging from deep love and compassion to brutal physical abuse. For example, a crucial Christmas scene begins with a tracking shot of a row of similar houses. Accompanied by choral music, the camera goes into one of the houses, where Tommy is decorating the Christmas tree. He says good night to his children and later makes sure they are sound asleep (they’re all crammed in one bed). “God bless, kids,” Tommy whispers before placing a stocking on their bedpost. In the next scene, the family is gathered for Christmas dinner, and as usual, Tommy claims his seat at the head of the table. Then, without any warning, his fingers begin to tremble and his body to shake. He angrily pulls off the tablecloth with all the dishes and food, yelling at his wife, “Clear this up!” This two-minute sequence captures the erratic conduct of an alcoholic patriarch, subject to contradictory impulses and going from extreme tenderness to uncontrollable brutality. Significantly, no explanation is offered for Tommy’s schizoid personality.
A stylized portrait, Distant Voices, Still Lives is a plotless narrative, consisting of impressionistic set pieces, presented out of order in a nonlinear mode. Told in flashbacks, the film begins and ends with family weddings, held several years apart, during which the grown-up children reflect on their father and his impact on their lives. Though Davies’s look is uncompromisingly harsh, the film is imbued with unmistakable humanism, an approach that refuses to see life as just a gloom-and-doom experience. The characters’ daily lives, he suggests, may be rough, but they are certainly not dull or conventional. His subtle observations form a compellingly coherent, visually vivid, emotionally powerful memoir. Though subjective and fragmented, his portrait bears the kind of timeless resonance that succeeds in speaking to viewers who grew up in totally different circumstances than his own.
In his unflinching search for truth, Davies shows understanding for all of his characters. The distinguished actor Pete Postlethwaite (nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Daniel Day-Lewis’s father in Jim Sheridan’s 1993 social injustice drama, In the Name of the Father) plays Tommy Davies, the violent taciturn father, and Freda Dowie is his suffering yet stoic wife. Angela Walsh is Eileen, the daughter whose marriage offers some promising change, if not complete freedom from a life of misery.
Davies transcends the dreariness and misery of his mood piece by creating a work in which music serves as a direct and lyrical expression of emotions. The musical numbers are stylized statements of feelings. The opening number, “I Get the Blues When It Rains,” plays in the background during a languid tracking shot through an empty, dark-green living room. The scene then dissolves into a medium shot of the main characters: the mother and her grown children, Eileen, Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), and Tony (Dean Williams). Clad in black and positioned in a spare tableau, they suggest figures in a faded family album.
The emotional power of Davies’s fractured and elliptical family chronicle is undeniable. The first part, Distant Voices, revolves around the painful memories of childhood, defined by fear and wartime suffering. As a boy, he is the product of a repressive Catholic childhood. The second half, Still Lives, portrays the slightly happier life of a widow, her daughters and son, and their friends, including Micky (Debi Jones). They gather in pubs, sing collectively, and begin to live—and also suffer from—their own lives. The songs they sing together include popular tunes like “Buttons and Bows,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” and “Bye-Bye Blackbird.” But the director makes sure to include some specifically ethnic songs, such as the Jewish “My Yiddisher Mama,” the Irish-flavored “When Irish Eyes Are Smilin’,” and the black-oriented “Brown-Skinned Girls.”
Music is the film’s main element, taking up over half of its screen time and fulfilling both narrative and emotional purposes, based on Davies’s belief that of all art forms, film is closest to music. Davies told Paul Farley: “I got my family to sing the actors the songs—on tapes. It was difficult, actually, deciding what to leave out. All the songs I’d heard them sing, that were my favorites, I put in. It was as simple as that.”12
The actors, being younger than the real-life characters they played, did not know the lyrics, and Davies engaged in a painstaking process of training and rehearsal. He has singled out Jones’s rendition of “Buttons and Bows,” Walsh’s heartbreaking rendition of “I Wanna Be Around,” and Peter Pears’s “O Waly, Waly,” which he sings as the newlyweds and the family disappear into the dark. Through the songs, the director wanted the viewers to feel his images instinctively and viscerally, just as they respond to music.
The marriages of Eileen, Maisie, and Micky signify solidarity with one another—and also hope, based on their innocent belief that their unions would differ from those of their parents. Nonetheless, from the start, Eileen’s marriage threatens to follow the same tragic pattern of her mother’s. In the pub, right after her wedding, Eileen sobs into the arms of her husband, George (Vincent Maguire), fearfully crying, “I want me Dad!” Later on, already sensing the patriarchal tyranny in her own marriage, Eileen rebelliously sings Johnny Mercer’s “I Wanna Be Around to Pick Up the Pieces,” a personal response to her own domineering husband.
Davies’s family life is evoked through subjective recollections. His poetic narrative drifts in and out of reality, suggesting the prevalence of ghosts and demons of the past. The film offers tension between the public solidarity, reflected in pub sing-alongs, weddings, and mournings, and the private horror of domestic abuse, depression, and unfulfilled dreams.
Davies’s empathy, just like that of Almodóvar and Haynes, resides with the women. The men are either flawed or damaged goods. The husbands of Eileen and Maisie seem to be variations of Tommy, the rigid father. “They’re all the same,” Micky remarks about the males, “When they’re not usin’ the big stick, they’re fartin’.” Though they are the heroines of the piece, the women are creatures of compromise. “Why did you marry him, Mom?” asks one daughter. “He was nice, and he was a good dancer,” her mother replies.
Memory is intensely linked to music from Davies’s childhood. Each snippet heard is connected to a specific emotional experience. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Taking a Chance on Love” is heard while the mother sits on a windowsill polishing the glass from the outside—a lyrical moment placed against the drab milieu. The director then cuts from the kids watching their mother by the window to her being brutally beaten by their father, but he lets the same music play as he shifts from a fondly recalled moment to a traumatic one.
The Futurist Cinema inspired one of the film’s most artistic and most emotional sequences, in which sisters Eileen and Maisie attend a showing of Love is a Many Splendored Thing, a 1955 Hollywood romance starring William Holden and Jennifer Jones. Quite impressively, a crane shot rising from the umbrellas outside the theater dissolves into a pan over the crying faces of those attending the show. The water imagery, which moves smoothly from the heavy rains outside to the intense tears inside, shows the interface of the external physical with the internal emotional worlds. It is set to the powerful melody of the movie’s theme, which became a hit song independently, going beyond the picture. (It is still a memorable song that’s often used in various contexts to signify romanticism). Incidentally, the Futurist, Liverpool’s first purpose-built and longest-surviving cinema, opened in 1912 and closed its doors in 1982, after seventy years of operation, an event lamented by Davies and many other cineastes.
Dramatically, it seems that the main purpose of Tony’s going AWOL as a soldier is to create the opportunity for a willful confrontation between father and son. The scene begins with Tony smashing a front window with his fist and ends when he is arrested by the military police and thrown into prison. Yet, while locked in the brig, Tony pulls out his harmonica and plays the melodic theme from Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 Limelight. In one of the film’s striking moments, Tony and George are observed in an overhead shot as they are falling together in slow motion through the same skylight. Both men have suffered work-related accidents that send them to the hospital, yet only George’s fall from the scaffold is shown on screen.
There are moments of comic, even surreal relief. When Maisie and her husband, Dave (Michael Starke), who live with her grandmother, are having dinner together, the door suddenly opens, and a man (a pale version of the father) appears with a candle. “I switched the light off,” he says, “but I don’t know whether I’m doing right or wrong.” After leaving, Dave asks, “Who was that man?” Maisie simply says, “Uncle Ted.” A moment later, Uncle Ted and his candle are shown as he is stopped at the stairs by the grandmother. “Teddy, stop acting soft!” she says firmly before blowing out the candle.
The text is restricted to a few locations—mostly interiors like the living room, the kitchen, the staircase, and the children’s bedroom. The outdoor scenes take place in the stable (the father’s work space), the hospital ward, the church, and, most important of all, the neighborhood pub. Confining the characters to specific areas highlights the prevalent sexual segregation and also intensifies the film’s emotional impact. Women in the pub often sit by themselves and sing together in joyous moments that are interrupted abruptly when the men are done discussing sports or wish to leave the party right away, disregarding the women’s needs.
The area in front of the house, as critic Koresko has noted, is of particular significance because it’s neither an indoor nor an outdoor space, though sometimes it functions as both, literally and figuratively. It is a place of relative relaxation, an escape from the internal and external oppression. Eileen, Maisie, and Micky go out there to smoke, and other family members use the space for much-needed fresh air during shared events. After his own wedding, Tony is seen crying in front of the house, which captures a rare moment of aloneness—the family is so large and there are so many gatherings that there are not many occasions to be quiet or alone.
Looking for locations, Davies recalled: “The house where I grew up was demolished in 1961. And it was unique. I was able to rebuild it for The Long Day Closes, but we didn’t have a huge budget for Distant Voices, Still Lives, so we had to find something that looked like a working-class street, and we shot in Drayton Park, but there were no cellars, so it wasn’t like our house. We had to go with what was there, because we didn’t have the money.”13
Though the interiors are cramped settings, such as bomb shelters, crowded houses, and pubs during holiday celebrations, the characters reach out and connect through music, while their feet remain firmly on the ground. Performing songs represents a fleeting, defiant ecstasy, a revolt against the crushing oppression around them.
Still Lives, the film’s second half, doesn’t make the same intense emotional demands on the viewers as Distant Voices does. Once the father dies, the film loses its dramatic momentum and narrative urgency, though it still offers plenty of events, both highs and lows, of family folklore. The tale concludes on a lovely note, showing Tony’s wedding followed by the departure of the guests, which signals an elegiac tone.
Davies has said that he deliberately divided the film into two contrasting halves, each made with different crews over a two-year period. Distant Voices has pale sepia tones, whereas Still Lives abounds in ethereal fades to white. Painterly stillness alternates with gliding camera movement. Bleak darkness prevails from the imagery of the dreary, cramped rooms and sunless hallways, to the black alleys, to the pubs and bomb shelters, which are lit only by pale rays. The little color that exists in these lives is reflected in the old photographs, which with time have faded into yellowish brown.
Distant Voices, Still Lives stands in sharp opposition to the Technicolor glory and upbeat mood of the MGM fantasy-musicals of the era, such as Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland, or American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, musicals that Davies loved as a boy and remembers fondly as an adult, but there are no glossy or glitzy set pieces in his art.
With his detached approach, Davies avoids the clichéd nostalgia and sentimental romanticism that often characterize such autobiographical movies. Take, for example, the personal features of British director John Boorman, who’s older than Davies by a decade. In 1987, Boorman wrote, produced, and directed Hope and Glory, based on his own experiences of growing up in the Blitz in London during World War II, the same era covered in Distance Voices, Still Lives. The title of his charming, Oscar-nominated feature derives from the patriotic British song Land of Hope and Glory.
Like Davies’s film, made one year later, at the center of Boorman’s fable-like story is a middle-class white-collar family, the Rowans, headed by Grace and Clive, who are raising three children—Bill, Dawn, and Sue—in a suburb of London. When Clive joins the army, Grace alone watches over the children. For ten-year-old Bill (Sebastian Rice-Edwards), the “fireworks” caused by the Blitz represent an exciting rather than terrifying spectacle. In a funny scene, Bill says “Thank you, Adolf” (Hitler) for forcing his school to close down. Though the rest of the family is not as cheerful as Bill, their will to survive the nightly raids brings them closer together. The melodramatic events—sister Dawn falling for a Canadian soldier and getting pregnant, or the family’s house burning down, ironically not in an air raid but in an ordinary fire—are secondary and depicted in a light way. The Blitz, the fire, and other disasters are causes for celebration because they allow Bill to stay home and spend more time with his favorite family member, the curmudgeonly grandfather (Ian Bannen). Significantly, Boorman, just like Davies, revisited his character in a sequel titled Queen and Country, shown at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, in which he depicted the bittersweet rite of passage of Bill (now played by Callum Turner), focusing on his national service in the British Army.
A comparison between Distant Voices, Still Lives and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective highlights the distinctive attributes of Davies’s film. Philip E. Marlow, the hero of Potter’s series, is a mystery writer suffering from writer’s block—and from psoriatic arthritis, a chronic skin and joint disease. As a result of constant pain and fever, and his refusal to take medication, Marlow falls into a fantasy world involving his Chandler-like novel The Singing Detective, an escapist adventure about a detective named “Philip Marlow” who sings at a dance hall and takes jobs that “the guys who don’t sing” won’t take. The tale’s three worlds of the hospital, the noir thriller, and wartime England often merge in Marlow’s mind, resulting in a fourth layer, in which the various fictional characters interact. Many of Marlow’s friends and enemies (real and perceived) are represented by the novel’s characters—particularly Raymond, Marlow’s mother’s lover, the villain in the “real” and noir worlds, who committed fornication with Marlow’s mother and cuckolded Marlow’s beloved dad.
There are many similarities between Davies’s and Potter’s works: Both are original, critically acclaimed personal works, inspired by and based on their authors’ respective experiences. Potter suffered from the same disease as his hero, and he wrote with a pen tied to his fist just as Marlow does in the last episode. Both were made at more or less the same time: Davies’s film was released in 1988, and Potter’s was broadcast as a BBC serial drama in 1986; it was telecast in the United States in 1989. Both works rely heavily on music and singing to convey the tone of the era and the shifting moods of the characters. The two works use flashbacks to evoke their heroes’ childhood during World War II, centering on the heroic mother figure. The real Marlow experiences flashbacks to his childhood in rural England and his mother’s life in wartime London.
But the differences are just as striking. Potter’s series unfolds as a noir mystery-melodrama that is never resolved, though there’s a vague plot about Nazi war criminals. This reflects Marlow’s and Potter’s view that fiction should be all clues and no solutions. Fiercely personal and idiosyncratic, Distant Voices, Still Lives does not borrow elements from film noir and does not conform to any genre—in fact, it creates its own genre. Then there is the absence of sex among the characters in Davies’s film, as opposed to the prevalence of adultery in Potter’s series. Finally, the tonality of the two works is decidedly different. The Singing Detective is sardonic, ironic, and bitter: Potter sees pop culture as the great divide, inevitably separating idealized fantasy from cruel reality. In contrast, Davies’s film, despite the pain and suffering, is ultimately a celebration of life, an upbeat manifesto of his personal philosophy that even the most mundane and miserable existence contains some elements of beauty and joy that should be cherished. Davies is able to find humanity and salvation in the most sorrowful reality.
American distributors are unfortunately (mis)treating Distant Voices, Still Lives and other art films by marketing them as depressing artworks, which is a misconception. Through the songs’ physicality and the women’s mixture of laughs and tears, Davies suggests that, despite the sorrow and grief, they—and we—should be grateful just to be alive. As an artist, he invites audiences to share in the suffering of his characters, which is realistic and grounded, but he also encourages audiences to participate in their joy and happiness, fleeting and ephemeral as they may be.
Davies’s follow-up, The Long Day Closes, is more profound and fully realized than Distant Voices, Still Lives—of the personal works, it’s his acknowledged masterpiece, though I personally prefer the 1988 film. In this 1992 text, which is extremely dense, he recalls the burgeoning awareness of his own homosexuality and how his discovery of cinema provided him both cathartic escape and ecstatic relief. In Distant Voices, Still Lives, the abusive father dies, and The Long Day Closes picks up the family during its next four years, relating events that occur until the time Bud (Davies’s screen surrogate) leaves primary school. The narrative is condensed into one crucial period, 1955–1956, when he was ten and eleven. With the father dead, the obvious dramatic tension is gone, but the saga contains a more subtle tension, one that resides in Bud’s emotional development and self-consciousness.
The Long Day Closes is more radical in form. Whereas physical and emotional pains bled out of the 1988 portrait, here the events in the life of the filmmaker’s surrogate, Bud (Leigh McCormack), evoke exaltation. Bud claims it was the most joyous time of his life—“I was sick with happiness.” “Everything seemed fixed, and it was such a feeling of security that this is how it will be forever, and I really believed that,”14 Davies said of this period.
In lieu of the father’s threatening violence in the earlier film, there’s tender love from his mother (Marjorie Yates) and protective affection from his three siblings (Ayse Owens, Nicholas Lamont, and Anthony Watson). Though bathed in love, he still feels isolated, as he is too young to be included in the activities of his older brothers and sister. Meanwhile, he experiences the first signs of homosexuality, a subject the director would return to in his nonfiction work, Of Time and the City.
Despite the warm family settings, Bud is a painfully solitary boy who experiences the first stirrings of homosexual desire along with the weight of Catholic guilt. We get a vivid image of Bud’s burgeoning awareness of homosexuality. From his window, he spots in his neighbor’s yard a hunky bricklayer, and there’s erotic desire in his staring. Upon noticing his look, the shirtless man winks back at him, which scares the boy and makes him feel ashamed. Bud is just beginning to realize (but not yet understand) his sexual difference, which will induce guilty feelings. Davies fuses the two elements by casting the same actor to appear first as the muscular bricklayer and then as the crucified Jesus during one of Bud’s daydreams. Later on, a Christmas family dinner is envisioned by the director as a version of The Last Supper, except that it’s Bud’s mother now who occupies Christ’s seat.
The soundtrack underscores the emotional content of the images. Once again, popular culture, songs, and old movies hold a sacred place in Bud’s life. In the opening sequence, the camera glides through a rain-drenched alley while sound snippets are heard, including the bombastic horns of 20th Century Fox’s logo theme and Alec Guinness’s sinister introductory line from The Ladykillers. They are followed by Nat King Cole’s smooth and velvety “Stardust,” with the lyrics “the music of the years gone by.”
As the family necessarily begins to dissolve, Davies brings to the gatherings a nostalgic (but unsentimental) sense of a community, one that struggles with the inescapable passage of time. The title implies the stagnation of oppressed lives, yet the movie is defined by motion and beauty. This becomes clear at the very beginning, with the credits sequence. We observe a seemingly static image, a still life of a bowl of roses slightly illuminated by sunlight, over which the credits roll. But then gradually the roses begin to wilt—their decline conveyed through extremely subtle, nearly imperceptible dissolves—until the petals scatter all over the table.
The idiosyncratic vision of Bud, a movie-crazed boy, is reflected in the densely layered sound design. Significantly, most of the songs are heard but not actually seen performed. The rich score consists of over thirty compositions, some of which are only partially sung or heard. Some songs are performed by a single figure and by the characters in groups while others are sung by characters in aural clips from classic films.15
There are tunes from Orson Welles’s second film, the elegiac 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons, and Judy Garland’s songs from Minnelli’s masterful 1944 Meet Me in St. Louis. The narrative reaches one of its heights with the Tammy sequence, in which the connections among the church, the school, and the movies, all forces and sacred places in Bud’s evolving consciousness, are made explicit. A series of overhead tracking shots linked by dissolves is scored with Debbie Reynolds’s sugary singing from that picture. (The impact would have been totally different had Davies actually shown the perpetually perky Reynolds performing it.)
Images of doors (and windows) recur in Davies’s oeuvre, suggesting the dual meaning of portals, capable of taking his characters into the exciting and the unknown, but also capable of closing behind terminated chapters with ominous signs for a darker future. In the opening, the camera drifts down a rain-soaked Kensington street where Davies grew up, now demolished and in disrepair. The camera then enters the open front door of an abandoned row house, showing its battered and drenched staircase. A subtle dissolve indicates that we are in the past when this boarded-up place is brought back to life with Bud on the stairs. At the end of the film, Bud passes through a door, and the camera stays at a remove as he enters a portal in his basement, beyond which there is a pitch-black void. We hear sounds of Welles’s melancholy narration from The Magnificent Ambersons, the voice of Martita Hunt’s Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations, and then a voice-over of a school lecture about erosion. These snippets signify deterioration and decline, the effects of the inevitable passage of time.
Only a pure filmmaker who’s totally free of commercial constrains would conclude his movie the way Davies does. The closing image of The Long Day Closes is a bold and original three-minute take of a full moon gradually vanishing behind the clouds.
ADAPTATION OF AMERICAN NOVELS
The moon is again a major image (and sort of a character) in The Neon Bible, Davies’s first film to be set in the United States. A young boy comes of age in rural Georgia during the 1930s and 1940s in this visually satisfying but thematically flawed and dramatically inert 1995 drama—by far the director’s weakest work.
Acclaimed for his evocative reflections of his own past as a boy of various ages in post–World War II England, Davies looks beyond his home country with his adaptation of the novel by John Kennedy Toole, who also wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. Once again, the story is told through the subjective eyes of an ultrasensitive teenager, here named David, who is played by Jacob Tierney at age fifteen (and by Drake Bell at age ten). As was the case for Davies himself and his alter egos in the British films, everyday life is one big continuous struggle for David.
The Neon Bible is narrated by David, who reflects on his youthful experiences with his father, a laid-off factory worker who turns to agriculture and fails. Abusive and short-tempered, he is like Davies’s own father in his British movies. Once the father goes off to war, the small family (David is the only child) slides into breakdown and deterioration. David is raised by his emotionally unstable mother, Sarah, who eventually loses her grip on reality. His chronic loneliness is interrupted by the arrival of his mother’s sister, Aunt Mae, a fun-loving actress and swing-band vocalist with a sputtering career, who stays with the family for several years.
The literary source on which the movie is based has an interesting back story: it is Toole’s first novel, written in 1954 when he was sixteen. Toole once described the novel as “a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various religions in the South. The fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama.” Toole did not think much of his creation—” the book was bad, but I sent it off a couple of times anyway.”16 The book was published only after the successful reception of his second novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole, who committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of either book, left his manuscripts under the control of his mother, Thelma.
In the novel, David learns of the religious, racial, social, and sexual bigotry in rural Mississippi, and he frames his ten strongest memories, one memory per chapter, while onboard a train, trying to escape the past. The tale comes to life when Aunt Mae moves in with David’s working-class family in their small and provincial town. Not much happens to David in the course of the text; the only character that experiences life is Aunt Mae, who becomes David’s mentor, surrogate mother, and confidante.
David does not get along with the other boys his own age. As director, Davies can obviously relate to the episodes in which the ultrasensitive, physically timid, emotionally introverted David is challenged by the more masculine boys, who slap him, beat him, and call him a “sissy.” Unable to defend himself, the humiliated boy runs back home, seeking comfort and consolation from the women, his mother and aunt.
David’s father, Frank, loses his factory job, and the family moves to an older house on a hill. The circumstances get worse and worse: when the family runs out of money, the frustrated and angry Frank buys seeds. When his wife argues that crops cannot grow in the clay of the hill soil, he hits her, knocking out one of her teeth. The family sighs with relief when Frank is shipped to Italy to fight in World War II.
A “revival” ministry that visits the town warns the residents that popular dancing is “immoral.” But the local preacher opposes this incursion and begins a rival Bible study class. Placing editorials in the papers and spots on the radio, each side attacks the other.
At one point, Aunt Mae becomes involved with a much older man, but her affair ends when the latter is arrested on morals charges. Aunt Mae takes a job as a supervisor in the local propeller factory, and at a company function, after entertaining the crowd, she gets an invitation to join the hired band as a singer.
David’s mother descends from mental instability into outright insanity upon learning that Frank has been killed in Italy. David and Aunt Mae take care of her as Aunt Mae tries to pursue a singing career. At age fifteen, David gets a job at the pharmacy, where he meets Jo Lynne, a girl visiting her ill grandfather. After seeing a movie together, David and Jo Lynne begin to date. Clyde, a member of Aunt Mae’s band who is in love with her, promises a record deal in Nashville, and she leaves, promising to send for David and his mother right away, which never happens.
In the last reel, when David realizes that his mother is missing, he begins searching for her in the yard, where she used to spend most of her time. He finds his mother bleeding, able to utter one last word—Frank—before expiring. From that point on, the tale becomes relentlessly downbeat. The local preacher insists on placing Sarah in an asylum, but Davis tries to stop him, and as the stubborn preacher climbs the stairs, he is shot dead. After burying his mother, David uses the remaining money to board a train, hoping to start a new life.
David’s loose recollections make up the plot, such as it is, which stresses intense images and poetic touches over narrative momentum. Working with cinematographer Michael Coulter, Davies again creates sharply conceived, painterly compositions—but to little emotional effect. Music has always been one of Davies’s strong suits and a staple of his features. In this picture, he makes evocative use of the Tara theme from Gone with the Wind and Glenn Miller’s version of Perfidia, among others. In the course of the tale, Aunt Mae gets to sing gently, in a small, husky voice, versions of “My Romance” and “How Long Has This Been Going On?” Aunt Mae is a feisty and sexual lounge singer, dreaming of a bigger, more successful career elsewhere. A woman who has lived a rich life, she represents the outside world to David’s limited existence. Once David meets her, his life is forever changed.
Only a few reviewers were impressed by Davies’s poetic approach and the dreamlike, hallucinatory quality of the narrative. However, most critics were frustrated by the text’s slow pacing, elliptical style, and recurrent imagery of a sad, lonely boy sitting in a railroad car with a huge moon looming over his head.
What the movie lacks in dramatic thrust is only partially made up for in momentary glimpses of insight and imagery. In The Neon Bible, Davies applies his customary pictorial vocabulary and poetic structure to a new territory. Occasionally, his storytelling is composed of images that bear some mystical resonance. For instance, the nocturnal revival meeting and a few other scenes suggest the paintings of Edward Hopper or Thomas Hart Benton. But historical authenticity is beside the point for Davies, and scenes of an evangelical tent show and a Ku Klux Klan meeting seem secondhand and peripheral.
Davies’s vision of the American South lacks the touching lyrical moments of his British stories. The Neon Bible is sharply uneven: some domestic scenes are portrayed with acute detail, but others, like the murder of the preacher and the funeral scene, are reduced to a few impressionistic images.
Arguably more than most directors, Davies knows how to convey a sense of nostalgia without sentimentalism. The entire film is a flashback, and the studied pacing and unrelenting downward mood never really allow viewers to forget that fact. The Neon Bible seldom manages to shake out of the dull funk that daydreaming creates. The end of the story takes a violent turn, upsetting viewers with its unexpected bloodshed. The conclusion, out of step with the film’s otherwise dreamy mood, is deliberately jarring.
Additionally, Davies was not careful in casting his leads. The two boys who play David are not expressive enough, and as played by Diana Scarwid, David’s mother, Sarah, comes across as one-dimensional—a frail, hysterical woman. Fortunately, the movie boasts a strong performance by Gena Rowlands as a woman who adores the spotlight—her hot red and purple dresses raise eyebrows among the Bible-thumping local farmers.
The Neon Bible is not a significant work—compared to the British masterpieces that preceded it and the personal memoir that followed. The film was poorly received—with mostly negative or indifferent reviews—at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Released by Strand, it failed to register with critics or viewers; shown only in big cities, it grossed a dismal figure ($78,072) in its initial run. And it did not do much for Gena Rowlands after the death of her brilliant husband director, John Cassavetes, with whom she made some seminal movies (The 1974 A Woman Under the Influence is my favorite).
Critics complained about the slow, lingering shots, which are meant to provide insightful meditation but instead emphasized even more the film’s inherent dramatic shortcomings. Others found fault with the elliptical style, which underscored the film’s slender narrative and lack of continuity. Critic Stephen Holden suggested that the film “may have succumbed to its own dreamy esthetic” by focusing on the same image too often.17 Another critic noted poignantly that the film “starts off dark and gets darker,” unfolding as “one long crawl into an emotional abyss without catharsis.”18 Indeed, the plot is not only weak but also marred by an absurdly hopeful ending that throws the whole tale out of balance.
Artists are often wrong in assessing the merits of their work, but in this case, Davies was right on target when he told Time Out: “The Neon Bible doesn’t work, and that’s entirely my fault. The only thing I can say is that it’s a transition work. And I couldn’t have done The House of Mirth without it.”19
Adapted for the screen from Edith Wharton’s beloved 1905 novel, The House of Mirth is a much stronger film than The Neon Bible. It is also more satisfying than The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese’s 1993 version of Wharton’s other famous book. Davies treats this novel of mores and manners, the author’s first important fiction, with respect but not slavish reverence.
Viewers expecting a middlebrow Merchant-Ivory production (A Room with a View, Howards End) or a film in the style of Masterpiece Theatre were disappointed with Davies’s version. As one critic wrote: “The masterpiece’s tasteful reserve—the aesthetic that allows the comfy feeling that the plight of characters in corsets and cummerbunds has little to do with our own—remains in aptly short supply.”20 Davies also refrains from the excessive voice-over narration that marred Scorsese’s Age of Innocence, an overstylized feature to begin with that was made even more detached by the mediated narrator (Joanne Woodward).
Wharton’s working title for the book was The Year of the Rose. The final title derives from Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” Set against the backdrop of New York in the 1890s, the text places its tragic heroine, Lily Bart, in a society described as a “hot-house of traditions and conventions.” Upon publication, the New York Times review hailed the book as “a novel of remarkable power whose varied elements are harmoniously blended.”21
Davies’s 2000 version was not the first stage or screen presentation of the book. In 1906, The House of Mirth was adapted to the stage by Wharton herself and Clyde Fitch. In 1918, there was a silent film adaptation, The House of Mirth (La maison du brouillard), made by French director Albert Capellani and starring Katherine Harris Barrymore; it’s considered to be lost.22
The House of Mirth is Davies’s most accessible and commercial film to date (grossing about $2 million in the United States), largely due to its casting. The ensemble is headed by Gillian Anderson (of TV’s The X-Files fame), Laura Linney, Dan Aykroyd, and Eric Stoltz, all estimable actors, but not necessarily associated with mainstream Hollywood. Though based on a prestigious literary source, Davies (who also wrote the screenplay) has made a personal work that bears testimony to his distinctive theme, visual style, poetic languor, and grace. He builds a mood of omniscient dread with a claustrophobic mise-en-scène. The period recreation is meticulous, but Davies’s adaptation is so precise and his strategy so austere that the film’s critique also becomes applicable to the present. The film, like the novel, indicts the morals and mores of New York’s social elite through the grueling tale of a fragile woman who becomes a victim of social prejudice and self-inflicted shame.
Lily Bart (Anderson)—like Hester Collyer, Davies’s heroine of The Deep Blue Sea—is a fallen woman who goes down the social ladder. However, The House of Mirth is darker in tone and closure. Initially, Lily is of good standing, even holding some power—she rejects an offer of advantageous marriage. However, torn between her desire for a luxurious existence and a life based on mutual respect and love, Lily ultimately sabotages her chances for marriage. In the end, she loses the esteem and support of her social circle, dying young, poor, and alone.
The story opens as Lily meets Lawrence Selden (Stoltz), a bachelor lawyer she is attracted to but cannot marry because he is not wealthy enough. Her social status begins to erode when Gus Trenor (Aykroyd), the husband of her friend Judy, gives her a large sum of money, and she innocently thinks it is a rewarding return on investments made for her. But transaction and mysterious visit to Gus have damaging effects on Lily’s standing.
To escape vicious gossip, Lily joins Bertha Dorset (Linney) and her husband, George, on a European cruise aboard their yacht, the Sabrina. During the trip, Bertha accuses Lily of adultery with George in order to shift attention from her own infidelity with the poet Ned Silverton. The ensuing scandal ruins Lily, her friends abandon her, and her Aunt Peniston disinherits her. Descending the social ladder, she works as a personal secretary until Bertha sabotages her position by turning her employers against her. She then takes a job in millinery, but her poor performance leads to termination.
Simon Rosedale, a Jewish suitor who had proposed when Lily was younger and more reputable, comes back. But she perceives his offer as a form of blackmail—he plans to use letters revealing Bertha’s affair, thus forcing Lily to burn them. Eventually, she receives her inheritance and pays her debt to Trenor. However, she has become addicted to drugs and dies from an overdose of sleeping pills. Ironically, Selden, the passive-aggressive lawyer who despite relative poverty is the only man she has loved, gains greater intimacy with Lily when she is dead than when she was alive.
What attracted Davies to the book was its structure and heroine: The House of Mirth is a tragic melodrama about how materialistic concerns can—and do—damage a frail woman physically and mentally. Lily is an aging society bachelorette, an ambivalent gold digger whom Wharton describes as “a figure to arrest even the suburban traveler rushing to his last train.”23 Like others in her milieu, Lily becomes addicted to the trappings of the upper class, but in order to attain them, she is dependent on the kindness of her old aunt—at least until she gets married. Perceiving herself as a commodity, she tries to sell herself to the highest bidder, but most of the available men whom she encounters are either bullies or adulterers.
Wharton’s narrative, which is replete with satiric details and psychological insights, chronicles the narrowing options of a woman who has never had many opportunities to begin with. The heroine’s longings make her unavailable to “men of substance” who would provide her status and fortune. And at the same time, she is vulnerable to humiliation by her rivals. Landing in debt, Lily begins her downfall, a process that continues until her demise.
A martyred woman, Lily personifies the tension between materialistic obsessions and moral principles. She’s a modern woman who “wants it all”—love and money—but on her own terms and with society’s approval. As a character, she belongs to the same universe as the titular heroines in James Cain’s Mildred Pierce and Henry James’s Daisy Kenyon, famous novels made into classic women’s pictures of the 1940s—both, incidentally, starring Joan Crawford at her prime.24
Some critics complained that Anderson was not beautiful or refined enough to play the heroine. However, in his film, Davies underemphasizes Lily’s charisma in order to show her as an outsider, a woman whose allure isn’t sufficient to disguise her lack of social status. She is driven by the impossible ambition to blend in, to become part of the social fabric. Davies said that he cast Anderson because he could imagine her as the subject of a John Singer Sargent painting. In his interpretation, Lily appears to be both magnetic and indistinguishable from her surroundings. Complicit in marketing herself as a commodity, Lily passes her expiration date and ends up, as she puts it, “on the rubbish heap,” dying devastatingly heartbroken.
In conveying Lily’s slow disintegration, Anderson relies more on body language and expressive gestures than on verbal dialogue. We observe her shifting from seductiveness to desperation and finally to resignation. She renders a commendable performance as a vulnerable femme, highly aware that one false move, one wrong word, can damage her reputation and affect her already uncertain future. Perpetually insecure and never comfortable in any position or social interaction, she illustrates Selden’s description of Lily as “a woman who has it in her to be whatever she believed to be.”
Uncharacteristic of Davies’s other works, The House of Mirth presents the story in a seamless linear way. He said he saw his goal as making a movie whose watching would be akin to reading Wharton’s novel, cover to cover. In his adaptation, he approximates what an article in the New York Times predicted: “The discriminating reader who has completed the whole story in a protracted sitting or two must rise from it with the conviction that there are no parts of it which do not properly and essentially belong to the whole. Its descriptive passages have verity and charm, it has the saving grace of humor, its multitude of personages has the semblance of life.”25
OF TIME AND THE CITY
It took Davies almost eight years to make another film, despite the critical praise for and success of The House of Mirth. In 2008, he completed his first documentary feature, Of Time and the City, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival to great critical acclaim. With its vintage newsreel footage, contemporary pop music, and wry narration by the director himself, the work is a bittersweet paean to Davies’s hometown of Liverpool.
Davies described his richly textured work as a “Chant d’amour for all that has passed,”26 borrowing, of course, from Jean Genet’s notorious feature. Some critics felt that with this documentary, which reflects a uniquely poetic sensibility, the director had done for Liverpool what poet Dylan Thomas had done for Wales. An elegiac remembrance of life, it is a beautifully assembled collage of images linked by subjective narration. Part photo album, part confessional memoir, Davies’s journey through his past reveals disappointment and anger, but it is not gloomy or bleak due to the witty and irreverent tone of his voice-over.
In Of Time and the City, Davies recreated the texture of his past by combining existing archival footage of Liverpool and the Merseyside area with new footage he shot specifically for this nonfictional work. The blend of documentary footage, which is radiant and often shocking, and personal observations offers insights into the ever-changing city as well as the ever-changing artist himself. Suitably timed to coincide with Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture, the film is a lyrical poem in which the director infuses his chanson d’amour with references to William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Anton Chekhov, Carl Jung, A. E. Houseman, T. S. Eliot, and others.
Davies begins with a quote from Félicien de Myrbach: “If Liverpool did not exist, it would have to be invented.” What follows is an intimate look at the process by which the city had transformed from the 1940s to the 1960s, during which time Davies came of age and began making movies; he left Liverpool in 1973. Though impressionistic, the portrait rings true. There’s harrowing World War II footage as well as a report of the director’s struggle with his homosexuality as a Catholic boy.
Davies’s sharp tongue is revealed in his poignant commentary on the British upper class and the pompous monarchy, institutions that have existed—and continue to exist—at the expense of the working class, whose socioeconomic conditions have only worsened over the years. It’s a concern shared by his contemporary compatriot Mike Leigh in several films—specifically, in High Hopes.
Davies is a few years younger than the Beatles, but they grew up in similar working-class milieus. Nonetheless, having suffered acute Catholic guilt over his homosexuality, he recalls a different history of British life than the Beatles’ view of Liverpool and then swinging London expressed through their cheery songs. Showing disdain for the popular group, he greeted the ascension of the Fab Four with a sarcastic rendition of “yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah.” Later on, he also lamented the decline of the “witty lyric and well-crafted love song,” reiterating his admiration for classical music and poetry.
Satirizing Liverpool’s aspirations, Davies dwells on his hometown’s pretentious official architecture, including the imposing cathedrals. He shows the city’s past through the grandeur of its imperial buildings, depicting how municipal and religious institutions have turned into chic restaurants and parking lots. Switching to contemporary images of the presumably rejuvenated city, he asks, “Where are you, the Liverpool I loved?”
Davies’s culturally informed narration includes quotes, poetry readings, personal memories, segments from radio plays, and carefully chosen songs, such as The Spinners’ “Dirty Old Town.” His commentary is in the same magisterial vein, though with savage and often camp and bitchy wit. In many passages, he adopts a mocking tone, but there are also touches of nostalgia, although without tears.
In one of the most revealing chapters, he shows the new slums. The camera pans across miserable housing and filthy cement halls, images that are accompanied by Peggy Lee’s rendition of the saccharine “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” In another contrast, troops embarking for the Korean War, reflecting stark and harsh reality, are projected to the sound of the sentimental “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” Davies concludes a tour of failed urban development by citing “the British genius for making ‘the dismal,’” which he perceives as a national characteristic.
The imagery reveals a tough, working-class, heavily Irish (Protestant and Catholic) port city dominated by railways and factories. There are rows and rows of dingy terrace houses—and steps that are scrubbed daily by the women who live there. In Davies’s neighborhood, old and young interacted, with children playing skipping songs and games on the streets, which were extensions of their small homes, populated by large families: “So much of our life as children was lived on the street. It’s utterly different today—the street life is gone.” While the women work in a communal laundry, wringing and mangling, the men are laboring to lay cables in tunnels. Davies doesn’t let his audience forget the hard labor of his parents and grandparents. He describes the narrow cobblestone streets where lower-class families lived in row-house terraces and in decaying brick tenements and their children played in squalid, rubble-filled lots. The narration doesn’t follow a linear course but goes back and forth in time, contrasting the old and the new Liverpool. Davies’s only bitter and angry work, Of Time and the City reveals deep ambivalence and ambiguity: He is unable to decide whether he wants to remember or to forget elements of his past. On the soundtrack, he reads in wry, melancholy voice his own poetry as well as quotes from great writers like Chekhov, Joyce, and Eliot. There are also recordings of fragmented ordinary voices, traces of old radio shows, and a wide selection of music ranging from Peggy Lee and the Hollies to George Frideric Handel and Gustav Mahler. Davies observes the ecstasy of attending big Hollywood musicals in dark movie houses and his adolescent fascination with and erotic desire for masculine professional wrestlers. The feature evokes his growing up as a working-class, Catholic, movie-obsessed, gay lad.
Davies has fashioned a melancholy love letter to the city that had shaped him—but that he had to leave. Of Time and the City takes an ugly reality and turns it into sublime poetry, resulting in a work that’s much more poignant than just an aggregate of memories and stark facts of urban life in decline. He notes that in constructing the documentary, the images preceded the text: “I wrote the commentary as the images unfolded, while I was cutting the film. At times, silence was sufficient.”27 At first, the producers didn’t want him to narrate, asking him to find a more famous commentator, but as he recalled, “I wanted to narrate my own poetry and T. S. Eliot, and I did the narration in one day.”28 Among the extracts used are tracking shots of street life from the documentary Morning in the Streets, a work he would have shot in the same manner.
Though Davies is not a political director, the film attacks sacred institutions: the monarchy, the government, and, above all, the church. He told Cineaste: “I am an intense Republican, and I see the monarchy as callously living off the people’s money.”29 He may be one of the few British artists to show public scorn for the royal coronation, described by him as “the start of the Betty Windsor Show.”
The government also comes under sharp criticism:
People were misled that the council estates were going to improve their lives and that a New Jerusalem was going to arise. But they were built shoddily. They were slums in the making, despite the government’s commitment to improve lives. The government had the illusion that they could create a community instantly. The old neighborhoods of terrace houses took generations to evolve. With the destruction of the old neighborhoods, the country began to socially and culturally implode, accelerated by Thatcher’s pernicious reign.30
Davies vents his frustration and antipathy toward the public-housing towers that promised a paradise to the working class but turned out to be new versions of slums. The homogenized buildings—beer cans in the elevator, graffiti in the halls, cracks in the pavement—emanate despair and desolation, the antiparadise.
As noted, a main target is the Catholic Church—the center of Davies’s life as a boy. He recalls deviant priests and corrupt officials who were never punished, and yet gay men were persecuted and imprisoned. That left its mark on a boy who knew he was gay. He was so eager for grace that he could never confess his homosexuality to the priest. He now feels that it was all “one big lie,” that he wasted years in prayer. He views organized religion as an unforgiving institution: “The church did me a great deal of damage. For somebody like me who discovered at puberty that I was gay—it was then a criminal offense in Britain—the church offered no succor. I felt then that if I prayed and was really good, God would make me like everybody else. Those years when I prayed until my knees bled were awful. I finally realized the priests were just men in frocks, and I dropped the church when I was twenty-two. It left a deep emotional hole in me, a sense of chaos.”31
Even though the church gave Davies a taste for pageantry and the fleeting joy of observing spectacle, it also scarred him deeply with its strictures, particularly regarding his homosexuality. It was the discovery of cinema and music that enabled him to build an alternative world and to become a first-rate artist. All of his work celebrates the joys, the pains, and the miseries of working-class life in images that are at once tender and harsh, emotional and scathing, indignant and hopeful, and tremulous with yearning and desire.
The emerging portrait is subjective: “The Liverpool I knew has disappeared. I’ve recreated a city that is no longer there. The last cinema in my old neighborhood, the Odeon, has been pulled down. The city is now a mythical city for me because memory is myth.” The film is about time and mortality: “I find some of the aged people in the film heartbreaking, like the old woman who lived a hard life but says God has been good to her.”32 Significantly, the only people who are heard speaking in the film are older women.
Davies remembers a Liverpool where soccer matches attracted huge crowds and Orange Parade marchers howled against Papists. There were also simpler pleasures like funfairs and trips to the beach at New Brighton with its bathing-beauty contests, deck chairs, and dancing. And there were the movies that he attended regularly, especially the Hollywood musicals that he loved and “swallowed whole.”
Davies said: “Returning to funerals and walking around the city made me feel how alien I had become. Liverpool is filled with memories, but much of what I remember has been pulled down.”33 He has no illusions about the past, but he is turned off by the modern Liverpool. His boyhood world was admittedly rough and constricted, but as bad as it was, there was joy to be had in family and community. In contrast, the new Liverpool has demolished its history and semblance of communal life. Now, it’s a city whose old churches have been turned into discotheques, whose promenades are empty of people. Much of the new construction consists of sterile office buildings and parking garages.
Like all of his work, Of Time and the City is a film about memory and the passage of time. Davies’s awareness of his own aging and mortality is manifest in the large number of shots of old people. In the ambivalent conclusion, fireworks accompany Davies’s “Good night, good night, good night.”
BACK TO THE WOMEN’S DOMAIN
Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea is based on one of Terrence Rattigan’s signature plays, about a sexually repressed woman fatally attracted to a younger World War II veteran. Despite strong reviews and a dominant performance from Rachel Weisz, the film received only limited theatrical release in the United States in the spring of 2012, after showing at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival.
This was the first play Davies adapted to the screen, and the result is his most obviously “British” film, though in terms of narrative and visual strategies, he has shaped it to his own specifications. The more he read Rattigan’s play, the more engaged he became in its theme:
It’s the story of a woman who leaves her husband William and her luxurious life for Freddie, the younger man with whom she has fallen madly in love. It’s the first time she’s felt erotic love. Her marriage was about companionship with a kind man. After rereading the play, I realized that it was about love, which is the strangest of all human emotions. It’s about how each character—Hester, her husband and Freddie—wants a different form of love from the person they’re in love with, and how it can’t be given. These are all heart-breaking themes.34
Davies makes a valiant attempt to modernize a play that is old-fashioned and middlebrow, even by the standards of London’s West End and New York’s Broadway. The film is meticulously directed with his characteristic style, beautifully acted by the performers who form the central triangle, and often touching. A major work in his canon, The Deep Blue Sea continues to explore the plight of love-starved, sexually repressed women, as manifest in the protagonists of The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth.
Most of Davies’s films are set in post–World War II England, including his autobiographical works, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, not to mention his documentary, Of Time and the City. Both historically and dramatically, The Deep Blue Sea belongs to Davies’s distinctive universe. The play takes place circa 1949–1950, when Davies was only four. However, that era, with its socioeconomic hardships and suffocating cultural mores, assumes a special importance for him, as he spent his youth growing up in working-class Liverpool a few years later.
With The Deep Blue Sea, Davies adapted a play by one of Britain’s most famous (and most produced) playwrights. Born in 1911, Rattigan was a diplomat’s son, educated in modern history at Oxford before embarking on a career as a playwright and screenwriter. Many of Rattigan’s works have been made into films, such as The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version with Michael Redgrave, and the Oscar-nominated Separate Tables, for which Wendy Hiller won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Like other gay playwrights, Rattigan drew on his own life (he was in love with a younger man who killed himself) and wrote especially strong roles for women. In 1952, Frith Banbury directed The Deep Blue Sea on the London stage with Dame Peggy Ashcroft. Since then, the part of Hester Collyer has been played by Vivien Leigh, Penelope Keith, and Blythe Danner, among others. And now the Oscar-winning Weisz essays the role of a judge’s wife who becomes the abandoned lover of a drunken World War II pilot. Davies’s film is the second screen version of his play, the first one being released in 1955.
In his play, Rattigan dissects the values of bourgeois morality—men’s fear of commitment, women’s sexual repression—and also the digressions and deviations from its restrictive codes, all of which are also recurring themes in Davies’s own work. The story is told from Hester’s POV, both in the present and in the past, the latter through carefully inserted flashbacks, one of which is set in 1940. As the opening credits roll down, the last words of Hester’s suicide note to her lover, Freddie, are heard. The scars of World War II are everywhere to be seen. The setting is a badly blitzed neighborhood in London one Sunday evening. Derelict buildings stand next to seedy boarding houses, and a bomb site exists at the end of the street.
The boarding house landlady, Mrs. Elton, puts out her milk bottles for the night. Unbeknown to her, one of her tenants—Hester—is about to take her own life. Hester leaves a suicide note on the mantelpiece. Lying down in front of the fireplace, she turns on the gas and drifts into a state of unconsciousness. She recalls the warm, comfortable home she had shared with her husband, Sir William Collyer, a celebrated lawyer. She then remembers meeting Freddie Page, a handsome RAF pilot, on a visit to the Golf Club at Sunningdale. The moment Freddie touches her, she realizes she has fallen in love. Despite her conventional morality, they begin an adulterous affair, during which she becomes sexually fulfilled for the first time in her life.
Hester’s reverie then stops abruptly. It is early on Monday morning, and some of the tenants in the boarding house have smelled gas coming from her flat. Mrs. Elton lets herself in with another tenant, Phillip Welch. Because the gas meter has run out, they attempt to revive Hester and send down for Mr. Miller, a tenant on the floor below. A mysterious figure who possesses medical knowledge, Mr. Miller will not admit that he’s a doctor. He forces Hester to vomit up the aspirin she has taken. She recovers but asks that they not tell Freddie about her “accident.” She then takes the suicide note and puts it into her gown.
With a cigarette in her mouth, she continues to remember the past. She recalls her father, a stern Anglican vicar, reproaching her and advising that she go back to her husband. She then remembers a weekend at her mother-in-law’s house. The monstrous Mrs. Collyer has little time for Hester and is wary of her daughter-in-law’s passionate nature. When Mrs. Collyer overhears Hester talking on the phone with Freddie, Hester is forced to confess her infidelity. William tells Hester he never wants to see her again, and she moves into Freddie’s grim apartment. To the landlady, and the rest of the outside world, the couple seems to be married.
Freddie hopes that Hester will make the flat “feel like home in no time.” On Monday afternoon, Freddie breezes in from playing golf at Sunningdale. As charming and upbeat as ever, he tells Hester about a possible job in South America. He doesn’t notice Hester’s silence, but suddenly a penny drops, and he realizes that he had forgotten her birthday and the special meal she had prepared for the occasion. He apologizes, but clearly it’s not something that is important to him.
When Hester relents, they kiss passionately, and Freddie’s casual cruelty is forgotten. While he is looking for some cigarettes in her gown, he finds the suicide note. Appalled, he leaves the flat in a fury. As she hurries to follow him, she runs into her estranged husband on the landing. Mrs. Elton, worried about her, had contacted William without telling Hester. It is the first time William has seen Hester since she had left him, and she invites him into the flat. Though he is angry with her, he is deeply concerned, wondering what could have driven her to suicide. She explains that it’s not money or that Freddie has been unfaithful to her. Rather, she feels ashamed of her position as a woman driven by desire for a man who doesn’t love her—or even care for her.
At night, Hester finds Freddie in a local pub where he has been drinking with his old RAF friend, Jackie Jackson. Outside the pub, the lovers quarrel—he is tired of her manipulative ways and needy sensuality. She pleads with him to come home, but he tells her that the relationship is over. He then tosses her a coin for the gas meter, just in case he’s late for dinner again. Hester muses on her past with Freddie. A row at an art gallery indicates how little he is interested in the cultured world that she had previously enjoyed. But she remembers the pleasure of being with him in the pub singing with his friends and the intense feelings when they danced together. In those romantic and sensual moments, she feels that her new life is more rewarding, perhaps even justifying the sacrifice of her old and secure lifestyle.
Hester calls Freddie from a public phone, asking him to come home and collect his things. She just wants to see him one more time, but he hangs up the phone on her. Deeply wounded, Hester goes down into the tube station and stands in agony on the edge of the platform. Is she about to follow the fate of other doomed adulteresses, such as Anna Karenina, played with great panache by Greta Garbo in 1935 and Vivien Leigh in 1948?
As the train approaches, causing her hair to flow sensually, Hester continues to remember the past. She recalls being in a crowded tube station during the war, where people took cover from the Blitz. Faced with the memory of many people wishing to preserve their lives, she wonders whether she really wants to extinguish her own. The train passes by and she decides to go home. Outside the boarding house, William is waiting, again concerned about her. He offers a new chapter with him, but she refuses—she can never go back to him or to her old life.
As Hester enters the house, she watches Mrs. Elton tenderly soothing her dying husband. In the dark room, Mrs. Elton tells her what true love is: “Wiping someone’s arse, and changing the sheets after they’ve wet themselves, but never letting them lose their dignity, so that you can both go on.” When Freddie tells Hester that he is taking the job in South America, she begs him to stay for one more night; she can’t bear being alone. The next morning she helps him get his things ready. Neither can bear to let the other go but won’t ask the other to stay. Freddie walks out, and Hester finally summons the courage to let him go. She goes to the gas fire and ignites it. But this time, having decided to live, she opens the curtains and faces a new life, alone. Like Aunt Mae and Lily Bart, Hester is liberated and then destroyed by sexual desire, but unlike them, she is liberated again, this time around from her own chains, her dependency on men for self-identity.
Titles of films are crucial to Davies’ work. The expression “between the devil and the deep blue sea” connotes ambiguity, a dilemma caused by the need to choose between two undesirable situations. It was originally a nautical reference citing the deep blue sea and a “devil”—a seam where two hull planks meet that is difficult to reach on a ship. For the director, the story of a woman who risks everything for the man she desires is a painfully uncompromising chronicle of the fear of loneliness and the frustratingly unreliable nature of love.
Rattigan is an expert in exposing British insecurities and hypocrisies about sex and class, and The Deep Blue Sea is one of his finest achievements. However, in Davies’s hands, Rattigan’s story, in which the playwright explored how the idea of love is inexplicable in terms of logic, becomes more than a love triangle: It is a personal dilemma that also reflects the collective state of the nation in the early 1950s. Britain is “Great” no longer, bankrupt as an economy, exhausted as a culture, and spent as a world power. It is a time of rationing and privation where luxury and indulgence, like Hester’s former life, amount to a prewar memory. Hester’s struggle for fulfillment is a rallying cry for personal freedom, particularly for women, reflecting the social and cultural transitions that were ushered in by World War II and that would result in real changes of sexual politics in the 1960s.
The movie depicts the desperate struggle of ordinary British folks trying to rebuild their lives and their society after the war. In the process, they have to come to terms with the decline of the British Empire, a thematic motif in the work of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger, and others involved in the new British theater and cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Davies does justice to a text that shares a common thread that runs throughout his work, exploring women’s positions in Britain’s oppressive society after World War II. Distant Voices, Still Lives is also a painful and devastating film about women’s positions in the 1950s. But in The Deep Blue Sea, the director has filtered the story through Hester’s POV, stripping away a lot of exposition to get to the heart of the story. As a result, the movie feels bigger and deeper than just another love triangle, with something to say about a nation climbing out of the rubble of war. All the characters are shaped or damaged by the war. By removing the extraneous characters, the film is like a symbolist story about individual freedom and sexual fulfillment.
Like Haynes, Davies holds that the great melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, once dismissed as “merely women’s pictures,” should be regarded as serious works of art, as collective articulations of women’s desires. However, unlike Haynes, who’s inspired by Douglas Sirk and pays tribute to him, Davies is an original director who does not imitate or pay homage to any artist. Instead, he imbues texts of “women’s films” with his own idiosyncratic style, as he once elaborated: “If you didn’t grow up in the 1950s, you have no idea how shocking it was for a woman like Hester to do what she did. She does something very courageous and bohemian. Hester gives up someone who loves her because she’s found erotic love. For me, the idea of doing something because you’re in the thrall of an emotion you can’t control, that’s timeless.”35
That said, Davies is uncomfortable with graphic depictions of sex. This movie is the first and only work in which he shot explicit sexual encounters between Hester and Freddie, though he presents them as a montage of still images, failing to convey the sexual passion that drives the couple. This weakness has led critic David Denby to poignantly observe: “Sex is the subject of everything that happens, yet this may be one of the least erotic movies ever made.”36
Davies does not impose any moral judgments on his screen persona. “I wanted to show sympathy for all the characters, even though they do things that could be judged wrong or hurtful. We see several different characters—it’s kind of a microcosm of what Britain was like then—and I wanted to make them all human because as soon as you give them humanity, you can accept their good and bad points.”37 Mrs. Elton cares for her husband, and Mr. Miller is brusque, but he’s also tender and offers help. They are all needy people but they’ve all got their different kinds of courage. The film is about “the nature of love, the nature of guilt, the nature of behaving honorably even if it hurts someone else.”38
As shown, the nature of time is one of Davies’s recurrent obsessions: “I love moving in and out of linear time, because there’s something thrilling about doing that.”39 Opening up the story to the wider canvas of film presented challenges, but it also gave the director an opportunity to explore a different way of telling the story. “Cinema and theatre are different. Cinema can reveal things,” he said. “And if you can reveal things, then there’s no need to talk about it. But you can also show the ambiguities that arise between the cuts. You can dissolve and the audience knows it’s time past or time forward. You can play around with the linear story and the remembered story, which influences the narrative. I love that idea of people being in reverie, thinking of the past and how it affects their present.”40
The film’s stylistic touches recall a seminal film from the 1940s, David Lean’s Brief Encounter. In The Deep Blue Sea, Davies pays homage both to Lean’s classic and to other admired “women’s films,” such as Letter from an Unknown Woman, Now Voyager, The Heiress, and All That Heaven Allows. Brief Encounter, produced in the year Davies was born, has haunted him for decades. Both Lean’s film and The Deep Blue Sea are about conventional women torn between the fulfillment of desire and the oppression of convention. Like Brief Encounter, The Deep Blue Sea is a subjective narrative, filtered through Hester’s consciousness. Like Celia Johnson’s Laura in Brief Encounter, Hester articulates her feelings to the audience in voice-over, which draws a real sense of intimacy41
Shot by cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, The Deep Blue Sea displays meticulously crafted lighting. There are impressive tracking shots, such as the one of an underground station during the Blitz. The film’s remarkable pans indicate precisely the shifting space and the changing proximity between Hester and her lover. The rigorous art design, the careful contrast of lights and shadows, and the evocative music are all devices that heighten the portrait of Hester as she transforms, leaving behind her initial vulnerability, pain, anguish, and humiliation and ultimately gaining greater self-consciousness and coming into her own as a woman. This is conveyed in Davies’s signature style of long, masterfully constructed takes, which place viewers inside the minds and souls of his characters.
Davies’s work resonates with moody music that comments on the characters and their actions. For this film, he chose a heartbreaking soundtrack, Samuel Barber’s The Violin Concerto to articulate the depth of Hester’s dilemma, much in the same way that Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 articulates Laura’s emotional crisis in Brief Encounter. Moreover, the director chose to stage Hester’s second suicide attempt at the underground station because the scene recalls Laura’s suicidal thoughts at Milford Junction. As dramatic characters, both women are in crisis, provoked to consider extreme acts.
As he does in The Long Day Closes, Davies employs popular music and pub sing-alongs to depict the era’s specific mood. The songs place the story in a particular historical moment and also add commentary on the characters. Jo Stafford’s “You Belong to Me,” a popular love song, expresses Hester’s needy, suffocating love of Freddie. The traditional folk song “Molly Malone,” about the life and death of a passionate woman, which is sung during an air raid also comments on Hester’s state of mind.
I began this chapter by stating that Davies is Britain’s greatest living filmmaker, and I would like to conclude by offering my reasoning. Mike Leigh, his contemporary and competitor for the title (in the positive sense of the term) has been more prolific and more accessible.42 Like Davies, he has premiered most of his features at the Cannes Film Festival, where Secrets & Lies, one of his two or three masterpieces, won the 1996 Palme d’Or, before scoring five Oscar nominations, though no awards. He was later nominated for the Best Director Oscar for Vera Drake, his chronicle of the cheery and innocent abortionist, splendidly played by Imelda Staunton.
Nonetheless, Leigh hails from television, and he is known for the long, collaborative process in which he writes his screenplays with his actors. The resulting features are very much character-driven and thus highly dependent on the particular actors involved. He has worked with such established talents as David Thewlis in Naked, Brenda Blethyn in Secrets & Lies, Jim Broadbent in several features, Sally Hawkings in Happy Go Lucky, and so on. In contrast, Davies does not work in such a collaborative way, and his best British features don’t boast recognizable stars, his American adaptations notwithstanding. Perhaps most significant is the fact that you can see (and enjoy) Leigh’s work as stage productions or teleplays, but you can’t see Davies’s work performed on stage due to his full use of the unique properties of film qua film.
Davies’s signature, including his distinctive visual style, is manifest in all of his features, regardless of their source material, cast, and director of cinematography. In fact, unlike Leigh, who has collaborated consistently with Dick Pope, Davies has teamed with four different cinematographers, and yet his features have a remarkably similar look. Distant Voices, Still Lives was shot by William Diver (first part) and Patrick Duval (second part), whereas The Long Day Closes was photographed by Michael Coutler.
Of the directors in this book, Davies is the most subjective, a single-theme filmmaker devoting his features and documentaries to one subject: his own life. Though he has not acknowledged the influence of Marcel Proust, in terms of subjectivity and remembrance of things past, Proust’s philosophy is evident in his work. The passage of time plays a profound role in all of Davies’s films: “We are at the mercy of time. In my films, I try to create a sense of the randomness of time remembered by moving from emotional moment to emotional moment, instead of depicting in a linear fashion what literally happened.”43
Thematically, the scope of Davies’s films may be limited, but their texture is richly detailed and their visual and aural strategies precise, elevating his oeuvre to the realm of pure art. Rigorously crafted, his films channel every element—images and sounds—through his subjective memory, one that’s inevitably shaped by the collective memory. You could say that he is using Liverpool not only as a historical setting but also as a sound stage (literally and figuratively) for his art. In each work, Davies has shown unfailing faith in the power of film as a personal and redemptive art as well as a broader form of entertainment.
TERENCE DAVIES FILMOGRAPHY
| 1976 |
Children (short) |
| 1980 |
Madonna and Child (short) |
| 1983 |
Death and Transfiguration (short) |
| 1984 |
The Terence Davies Trilogy (collection of the three shorts) |
| 1988 |
Distant Voices, Still Lives |
| 1992 |
The Long Day Closes |
| 1995 |
The Neon Bible |
| 2000 |
The House of Mirth |
| 2008 |
Of Time and the City |
| 2011 |
The Deep Blue Sea |
| 2015 |
Sunset Song |