Film review

  • Dragonfly

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Andrew Williams (2025)

    When Brenda Blethyn called time on Vera after fourteen seasons, she planned to take a break from acting.  When she received Paul Andrew Williams’ script for Dragonfly, she changed her mind.  Blethyn, who’ll be eighty early next year, plays Elsie, living alone in a semi-detached bungalow, on an anonymous housing estate in England in the present day.  Elsie and her late, much-missed husband moved there when the estate was first built, thirty-odd years ago.  After a recent fall, in which she broke a wrist, Elsie doesn’t get out of the house, not beyond her front garden anyway.  She watches television, much of the day.  Her main visitors are agency workers from social services, who help her shower and serve her up a ready meal (although she does some cooking independently).  Her few phone conversations are with her married son, John, who’s keen to tell his mother what she should and shouldn’t be doing, less keen on visiting her:  Elsie hardly ever sees John, let alone her grandchildren or daughter-in-law.  In the adjoining semi, Andrea Riseborough’s Colleen, Elsie’s neighbour for the past year or so, has her adored dog, Sabre, along with the TV, for company.  One day, Colleen calls at the door to ask if Elsie wants anything from the shops.  It’s the start of a gradually developing friendship between the two isolated women, and Colleen becomes Elsie’s de facto carer.  (She’s half Elsie’s age, but seems the lonelier of the pair.)  John’s voice on the phone is disapproving and increasingly suspicious of his mother’s new companion.  He (Jason Watkins) turns up in person to investigate what’s going on.

    It’s easy to understand why Brenda Blethyn decided the part of Elsie was too good to miss, and Paul Andrew Williams supplies her and Andrea Riseborough with plenty of good, credible dialogue.  For at least the first hour (the whole film runs ninety-eight minutes), the situation is socially very well observed.  The narrative isn’t greatly eventful, but the leads’ acting (it’s virtually a two-hander), and the characters they bring to life, were more than enough to absorb this viewer.  In the later stages, things go badly wrong – for Elsie, for Colleen and for Dragonfly as a whole.  It’s not unusual, of course, that the makers of drama in which not much seems to happen, start to worry about their audience feeling short-changed.  But whatever Williams’ reasons, it’s hard to see why he needed to take such a violent route to his story’s destination.

    Williams creates an obvious but effective contrast between Elsie, a woman with no secrets, and Colleen, whose shadowy past is only sketched in, through occasional scraps of conversation.  (She says she was abandoned by her birth mother as a child and brought up in foster care.)  It is clear, though, and soon, that Colleen has anger management issues.  Early on, watching different agency workers come and go from Elsie’s, Colleen decides one hasn’t put in a full hour, and has a go at the woman.  One aspect of the set-up is a puzzle, well before the film goes off the rails.  Williams, who filmed in and around the town of Knottingley in West Yorkshire, may have wanted to give the impression the story could be happening anywhere in the country, but the agency workers (who include Rochenda Sandall and Sandra Huggett) and people working in local shops mostly have northern accents.  What’s more, Elsie, who has a London accent, tells her son, when he asks why she doesn’t move closer to him and his family, that she doesn’t want to go ‘up North’.  So where does she live?

    Colleen’s West Country accent is no problem because we assume she’s moved around.  And the larger uncertainty about her personality, and her motives for befriending Elsie, makes it easier to accept things that aren’t fully explained, at least as they relate to Colleen.  At one point, she’s going to have tea with Elsie, and tells her to be prepared for a surprise.  Colleen, who doesn’t wear make-up, then watches an online cosmetics tutorial and paints her face, before abandoning the attempt, and throwing out the various make-up she bought for the occasion.  The episode is frustrating, though:  Williams has shown Elsie getting tea things ready, in pleased anticipation of Colleen’s visit, but then omits the old woman’s reaction to her guest’s not turning up.  There’s no suggestion that Elsie, next time they meet, asks what happened.  The narrative has been so painstakingly gradual – with small domestic developments meaning a good deal to both characters – that this seems a cheat.  But it pales into insignificance beside the plotting in the closing stages.

    The title derives from James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks, a quote from which is the film’s epigraph:  ‘Time is for dragonflies and angels.  The former live too little and the latter live too long’.  Dragonfly is also a dual give-a-dog-a-bad-name story.  Colleen and Sabre are kindred spirits and mutually devoted.  Sabre sleeps on Colleen’s bed (taking up a good half of the available space); the sweet-natured dog’s bark is decidedly worse than its bite.  Yet John’s short visit is enough to confirm his prejudice against both Colleen, because she lives on benefits, and her large, white American Bulldog.  Thanks to contact from John, the police forcibly remove the dog, and Sabre is euthanised.  Colleen is furiously distraught and Elsie, when she finds out what’s happened, hardly less distressed.  John, now a phone voice again, explains to his mother that the dog is a banned breed.

    This alas is only the beginning of the end – by which point the fact that American Bulldogs aren’t a banned breed in the UK seems a minor implausibility.  When John visits a second time, Colleen stabs him fatally in his car (though how she manages to intercept the car before it reaches the bungalow, I didn’t understand).  In Elsie’s kitchen, Colleen slits her wrists and bleeds to death.  When Elsie desperately tries to help, she slips in Colleen’s blood, and crashes down, knocking herself out.  The closing scene shows Elsie staring into space, one in a row of old women in a care home.  Sabre’s death would have made for a sufficient tragic climax to Dragonfly and got Williams to where he wants to get to.  Colleen is kind to Elsie, unlike John or the perfunctory agency workers, but the loss of her beloved animal could have been enough for her to break off contact, increasing the risk of a domestic accident for Elsie and a decision being made that she was no longer capable of living at home.  The traumatic horrors of the last few minutes upend Dragonfly:  they’re way too big for the story.

    Yet Brenda Blethyn, Andrea Riseborough and the best of Paul Andrew Williams’ writing and direction make you glad and grateful this film got made, and I’m going to try to remember the positives.  Colleen decides it would be good to get a two-way radio so that Elsie and she can ‘chat easily’ when each is in her own home.  The radio is eventually put to unhappier use but the sequence where Colleen sets it up and, from another room, instructs Elsie on how to get started, includes one of the best film lines of the year – a line that also gives a flavour of Dragonfly’s humour, which won’t be very evident from what I’ve so far put in this note.  Colleen explains that, to speak through the device, Elsie needs to press a button on the side of the handset.  Daunting technology guarantees brain freeze.  Elsie pauses for a moment, then replies, ‘Do you mean the side on the side or the side on the front?’  I could really relate to that.

    20 November 2025

  • The Long Day Closes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Davies (1992)

    BFI’s CEO Ben Walters, self-described Terence Davies superfan, introduced this screening of The Long Day Closes.  The introduction was first rate:  accustomed as he surely is to public speaking, Walters impressed with a concise blend of professional cineaste and personal observations about the film and its auteur.  As a film-fanatic teenager, he first heard of Terence Davies on Barry Norman’s Film ‘93 on BBC TV.   Walters was watching the programme mainly for a featurette on the upcoming Jurassic Park …

    Like the Still Lives half of its 1988 predecessor, The Long Day Closes has a 1950s Liverpool setting.  This time, Davies’ representative on screen is twelve-year-old Bud (Leigh McCormack).  The youngest child in a working-class Catholic family, he lives with his mother (Marjorie Yates) and older siblings; viewers already familiar with Davies hardly need to be told that the children’s father was abusive and is now dead.  Bud’s present life is happy enough, though he’s troubled by aspects of his religion, and his native diffidence is increasing, especially in relation to boys his own age, in tandem with developing sexual awareness.  (Davies’ choice of name for his protagonist is presumably symbolic.)  Early on, Bud, at an upstairs window of his home, is transfixed by a bare-chested bricklayer (Kirk McLaughlin) working in the street outside.  When the young brickie catches sight of Bud watching, he smiles back.  Much later in the narrative, in Davies’ most striking (con)fusion of sexual and religious imagery and feeling, Bud has a fantasy about Christ on the cross, in the person of the bricklayer.  Actors in Davies films, however experienced, rarely deliver performances that seem convincingly independent of the director’s intentions.  Leigh McCormack, in his first (and only) screen appearance, certainly couldn’t be expected to.  He’s likeable, though, and rather different from some of Davies’ other boyhood alter egos – tall, with a pleasant, humorous face, not an obvious wimp.  I can’t imagine the film had a lengthy shooting schedule, yet Leigh McCormack’s face seems, remarkably, to age somewhat as the shadows lengthen for Bud.

    In the film’s extended finale, DP Michael Coulter’s fine images of a mackerel sky that slowly fades into near-darkness are accompanied by the Arthur Sullivan piece that supplies Davies’ title (sung a cappella by the choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua).  Before that, there’s been a good deal of very different music, as well as several snatches of dialogue from contemporary films.  The choice of both reflects Davies’ two-pronged approach to the cinema of personal memory.  He wants to recreate his past on screen.  He also gives a retrospective commentary that stresses that past’s irrecoverability.  The soundtrack includes popular recordings from the early post-war years ranging from Kathleen Ferrier’s ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ to Nat King Cole’s ‘Stardust’.  Songs such as these naturally evoke personal memories and associated feelings for audience members who remember the 1950s, putting us at least somewhat on Davies’ wavelength.  The highlight of The Long Day Closes for me, though, was a song that, despite a pretty melody, isn’t musically in the class of the two others mentioned.  ‘Tammy’ was composed by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the first ‘Tammy’ movie, Tammy and the Bachelor (1957).  Debbie Reynolds, who played Tammy in that film (before Sandra Dee took over the role), had a number one hit with the song in the US, and it’s her version that Davies uses.  The superb sound quality heightens the yearning, luscious strings accompanying Reynolds’ vocals.  This not only suggests how the song made the adolescent Terence Davies feel but also expresses a sense of how intensely and, because it’s part of something lost, how longingly he now remembers it.  While ‘Tammy’ is playing, Davies, in other words, integrates the two sides of his remembrance of things past.

    When his actors are doing the singing, the effect is very different.  The pub chorus in Distant Voices, Still Lives, although eventually overused, worked well enough; but when Bud’s mother sings, to herself, ‘If You Were the Only Girl (In the World)’, Davies asks the excellent Marjorie Yates to act her character’s emotions as she sings.  Bud’s mother is clearly remembering her late husband, so the memory is bittersweet, but the meaningful hesitations and pauses in her singing look contrived, even stagy.  The film excerpts layered over or forming a bridge between Davies’ images are effective when you can accept them as part of the cinema-going experience of twelve-year-old Bud, who’s already addicted to the pictures.  The voices of Martita Hunt, explaining Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed wedding breakfast in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers (1955) and Terry-Thomas (‘Absolute shower’) in Private’s Progress (1956), all pass this test.  Bits of Orson Welles’ voiceover narrative from The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) don’t.  This notoriously butchered film was hardly seen by anyone for many years, almost certainly not shown in British cinemas in the mid-1950s:  it wouldn’t have meant anything to Bud.  Davies is merely appropriating Welles’ elegiac words about a vanished way of life, and it feels phony.

    The Long Day Closes, said Ben Walters, is widely regarded as the apex of the first, autobiographical phase of the Terence Davies oeuvre.  While I’m sure Walters is right, I found nothing in what Davies puts on the screen here as powerful as the old man’s deathbed episode in Death and Transfiguration (1983).  As usual, Davies’ studiedness kept getting in the way.  A Christmas family tableau shows Bud’s mother, in the centre of the group, in her best frock; she and her children sit at a table full of good things to eat and bathed in light.  I realise Davies means to elevate the occasion – to create, you might say, a visual equivalent of the ‘Tammy’ moments on the soundtrack – but it can’t work in the same way:  the whole thing looks improbably opulent, given the family’s means.  A visit to Bud’s school by the nit nurse (Brenda Peters) should be strongly redolent of most 1950s English childhoods but the nurse’s pronouncements (‘lice’ or, in a small minority of cases, ‘clean’) are too deliberate for the scene to seem real.  The male teachers doling out corporal punishment at the school are so gruesomely overplayed that the actors seem to be sadists, too.

    19 November 2025

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