Monthly Archives: November 2025

  • Distant Voices, Still Lives

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Davies (1988)

    In the summer of 1989, Sally and I, with a good friend, sat down to watch Distant Voices, Still Lives in a cinema on Tottenham Court Road.  The three of us left within half an hour of the start.  Since then, I’ve seen, and seen through, plenty of Terence Davies films.  BFI’s current ‘Love. Sex. Religion. Death’ programme – their first Davies retrospective since his death in 2023 – was a good opportunity to give the work that made his auteurist name, a second go.  There were no thoughts of an early exit this time, yet I still understand why we walked out all those years ago.

    Prior to Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies had made only the three short films, Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983), which run forty-seven, thirty and twenty-six minutes respectively.  His first feature runs only eighty-five minutes in toto, and, as its title suggests, comprises distinct parts, of approximately equal length.  Indeed, the halves of the whole were shot as separate films, with an interval of two years between them and with a different cinematographer for each part – William Diver for Distant Voices, Patrick Duval for Still Lives:  to Davies’ and his DPs’ credit, the combined result is visually seamless.  (It may have helped that Diver edited the entire work.)  The events in the first film take place around a decade before those of the second.  Distant Voices is set in the 1940s, mostly during World War II; Still Lives throughout the 1950s.  In both cases, the narrative is a mosaic of events within the overall timeframe, rather than a chronological sequence.

    Like the shorts that comprise what came to be known as The Terence Davies Trilogy, Distant Voices, Still Lives is strongly autobiographical, never mind that most of Distant Voices happens before November 1945, when Davies was born, the youngest of ten children in a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool.  In this version of his family’s life, he sensibly reduces the brood to three children.  Nell Davies (Freda Dowie) and her husband Tommy (Pete Postlethwaite) have two daughters, Eileen (Angela Walsh) and Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne); the couple’s only son, Tony (Dean Williams), gradually emerges as the writer-director’s screen alter ego (although less obviously so than the Trilogy’s protagonist).  In Paul Farley’s monograph on Distant Voices, Still Lives in BFI’s Modern Classics series, Davies describes his choice of filming locations, especially the main one:

    ‘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… working class … we shot in Drayton Park [in North London], 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.’

    At several points during Distant Voices, Still Lives, Nell and her children stand for a family photograph – on Eileen’s and Maisie’s wedding days, before then on the day of Tommy Davies’ funeral.  Each time, the family group is posed against a wall in a room of their house, the wall bare except for another, framed photograph, of a man.  Never shown in close-up, this man is Terence Davies’ own father, who died when his youngest son, who loathed and feared him, was seven years old.  There’s quite a bit to unpack from those three sentences.  Although he couldn’t use the real place he grew up in, his real father’s image on the wall in the stand-in house in Drayton Park serves as an assertion of Davies’ personal film-making doctrine.  Yet you know the identity of the man in the photograph not by watching Distant Voices, Still Lives but by reading about it.  When violently abusive Tommy exits the film, it’s a relief for the family he leaves behind (and for the audience – more on that below).  They’re dressed in black for his funeral, but the occasion is also something of a red-letter day for the wife and kids he used to beat.  That, at any rate, is what seems to be implied in the family photograph marking the occasion.

    But perhaps the funeral group, unlike the subsequent wedding pictures, isn’t literally a family photograph but one of the film’s numerous tableaux, hinted at in the carefully chosen title.  At the start of Distant Voices, the camera moves round the seemingly empty house, to the accompaniment of disembodied voices.  Still Lives must refer to the artful visuals:  the lives of the Davies family and their friends are anchored in domestic and social routine but not static or uneventful.  Davies means, through what he puts on the screen, to give his personal history the mythic status that he feels is its due.  He conveys how he sees the past in some effective ways.  The lighting of sunny weather sequences somehow suggests retrospection rather than immediate experience.  There’s a moment when Tony, parting from his mother one evening and after they’ve said goodbye, holds her in his look, as if consciously committing the parting to memory:  here, the young man on camera seems to fuse with the older man recapturing the moment behind it.

    Davies aficionados may well see the predominantly deliberate acting as of a piece with the considered recreation of images.  I can’t get past the contradiction in giving actors real people to play and vernacular dialogue to speak, then asking them to deliver their lines – and to look and move – in a style that, rather than bringing them to life, underlines their character’s legendary status, according to how Davies sees them.  In the Trilogy films, he worked mainly with actors who were little known at the time and stayed that way; it’s not difficult to see wooden acting in those shorts as a natural consequence of having to make a film on a tiny budget.  The cast of Distant Voices, Still Lives, though, includes people either already known at the time (to this viewer, at least) as dependably good actors, or who would go on to bigger things – for example, Freda Dowie in the first category, Pete Postlethwaite and Lorraine Ashbourne in the second.  Their acting talents aren’t invisible here so much as distorted.

    I think we gave up on the film in 1989 because the early stages are dominated by Tommy Davies’ supposedly terrifying violence, which Terence Davies’ approach renders artificial.  Pete Postlethwaite’s face certainly magnetises the camera, yet when Tommy belts his wife or Maisie (Eileen, Tommy’s favourite, is luckier), or hurls to the ground food laid out on the table for a Christmas tea, the staging makes it overdone and unreal.  Although the style of Distant Voices, Still Lives is consistent throughout, it’s easier to tolerate once ‘psychotic’ Tommy is out of the picture (Davies described his own father as ‘psychotic’, says Wikipedia), and the film gets into describing more moderate, sometimes even affectionate, forms of marital combat.

    The first part has the vocal label, but it’s the second part in which voices – particularly singing voices – really take over.  In Distant Voices, the occasional sequences of the family and their friends in the pub, singing favourite songs together, come as a relief.  In Still Lives, these sequences dominate almost too much.  For me, the most enjoyable musical bit in the second half comes from Pauline Quirke’s Doreen, a family friend who arrives to babysit for the evening and, while she’s waiting in the front doorway, sings to herself Alma Cogan’s ‘Dreamboat’.  Quirke does what hardly anyone else in the film manages to do:  she elevates – you might even say immortalises – the moment yet she seems completely natural.  There’s no doubt that Davies can use music more simply as a means of simultaneously recalling and regretting the loss of times past.  As well as the pub singing and some church and classical music (mainly Britten), the soundtrack includes a cornucopia of popular songs – ‘Taking a Chance on Love’, ‘The Finger of Suspicion’, ‘O, Mein Papa’ and ‘Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing’, to name just a few.

    23 October 2025

     

     

  • Urchin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Harris Dickinson (2025)

    Successful young film actors notoriously often say, ‘But what I really want to do is direct’.  One of Britain’s best, still not yet thirty, Harris Dickinson has been shining on screen for the best of a part of a decade.  I don’t know if he has said he’d rather direct; if he has, he’s now turned word into deed with Urchin.  You certainly don’t want Dickinson to disappear – it’s a bonus that he plays a supporting role in his debut feature – but Urchin, which he also wrote, certainly whets your appetite for more from him behind the camera.

    Dickinson’s title character is Mike (Frank Dillane), a thirtyish homeless man in present-day London.  At the start of the film, drug-dependent Mike, begging on the street, gets cash from an elderly couple then has it nicked by fellow addict Nathan (Dickinson).  The pair scrap outside the UCL East building in Marshgate; Simon (Okezie Morro), a well-dressed, well-meaning passer-by, intervenes and, once Nathan has departed the scene, offers to buy Mike a sandwich.  In return, Mike violently assaults Simon, steals his watch and tries to pawn it, before being arrested.  He serves half of a fourteen-month jail sentence.  On release, he’s interviewed by a probation officer (Buckso Dhillon Woodley), who arranges hostel accommodation.  She also reminds Mike that she knows he knows ‘how it works’.  He has, in other words, been through this process before.  Urchin basically describes one revolution of the vicious cycle of Mike’s existence, but Dickinson is intent on elevating the film above slice-of-life realism.  By the closing stages, Mike is back to drugs, debt and crime.  In Urchin‘s phantasmagoric finale, he literally spirals down, falling through darkness until he seems to reach the bottom of the pit.  There he curls into a foetal position and is consumed in void.

    Dickinson doesn’t dwell on the miseries of Mike’s time in prison or do the obvious thing of having his grim story play out under grey skies and lashing rain.  Drab urban settings are hardly in short supply but nor are they the whole show.  Cinematographer Josée Deshaies takes every opportunity to highlight bright colour – an orange jacket of Mike’s, the blue bibs worn by him and his co-workers, whose job is picking up litter in Potters Field Park, near Tower Bridge.  Dickinson gets a vivid, fluent lead performance from Frank Dillane (Stephen’s son, Richard’s nephew), orchestrates the naturalistic playing of the supporting cast, and demonstrates a talent for finessing details in ways that heighten their impact without violating the prevailing realism.  At a pre-interview for a restorative justice session with Simon, Mike meets Scott (Michael Colgan), who’ll mediate the session, and complains about his breathy voice, which Mike thinks phony and patronising.  He says this without undue aggression, but his words hit home:  the unfortunate Scott doesn’t know what to say next or, especially, how to say it.  Near the end of the film, Mike reconnects with Nathan, now in work and living with an older woman (Lacey Bond).  His domestic duties include feeding her pet snake.  An image of the snake gobbling a mouse is startling but comical, too.

    Dillane conveys strongly, almost wordlessly, Mike’s loneliness; at the same time, Urchin includes touching moments of connection between him and some of those he meets.  Franco (Amr Waked), who runs the busy kitchen of a ropy hotel, takes him on as an apprentice chef.  One evening, Mike accompanies two other kitchen staff (Karyna Khymchuk and Shonagh Marie) to a karaoke session in a local bar.  It’s not long before Mike’s unreliable moods and timekeeping lose him the kitchen job; the litter collecting follows, and he gets friendly with a French colleague, Andrea (Megan Northam); they sleep together before falling out and parting company.  Mike and Andrea spend an alfresco evening with an older pair of outsiders, a man and a woman.  This culminates in nighttime dancing to Desireless’s ‘Voyage, voyage’; like the karaoke interlude, where Mike and the others sing along to Atomic Kitten’s ‘Whole Again’, the dance is heartening, with tantalising hints of the possibility of enjoyable social life.  It’s a high point, too, in the sense that things go downhill for Mike from this evening onwards:  the older man tempts him into taking ketamine.  Dillane and Dickinson show wholehearted sympathy with Mike but don’t stint on showing how unreasonable he can be.  He feels consistently thwarted by others, including authority figures (that’s how Mike sees them anyway).  Dickinson treats the latter more fairly than Ken Loach has usually done.  Rather than proxies for a heartless establishment, these are people trying to do unenviable jobs as decently as they can.

    I was less keen on Urchin‘s more calculatedly aesthetic side.  This is heralded by the first appearance of an old woman (Holly de Jong), playing a violin in the street, but with Mike an audience of one.  The woman pops up again as a busker and near the end of the film, just before Mike’s final descent, as a kind of votary; by now, Dickinson’s Nathan has also transmogrified into a robed, quasi-sacerdotal figure.  These elements – along with foreshadowing of Mike’s descent to darkness in close-ups of water swirling down the plughole of the shower in his hostel room – could be seen as a copout on Dickinson’s part, an admission that he can’t, if he sticks with realism, bring the film to anything but a predictable downbeat conclusion.  That may be partly true, yet you sense something more positive in the determination to avoid ending Urchin with the protagonist back in jail.  This first-time director is keen to go beyond social realism, even if he doesn’t on this occasion find a satisfying way of doing so.  And the weird religious imagery of the closing scenes does serve a kind of bookending purpose, with its echo of the film’s opening sequence, where Mike’s disturbed from sleep in cardboard city by the loud voice of a street preacher (Claudia Jones) proclaiming Jesus’ love.  Urchin premiered (alongside Harry Lighton’s Pillion) in this year’s Un Certain Regard at Cannes.  Frank Dillane won the section’s Best Actor award and Harris Dickinson the Festival’s FIPRESCI Prize.  Both well deserved.

    21 October 2025

     

     

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