Terence Davies (2008)

The title – particularly the Latinate ‘Of’ – makes you fear the worst, and your worst fears are realised.  Terence Davies’s marriage of an eclectic soundtrack and newsreel footage, spanning several decades, of his home city of Liverpool is absorbing and sometimes attractively ambiguous.  The very act of assembling this archive material makes the film worthwhile.   But Davies’s narration is deadly – so much so that it starts to interfere with the sights and other sounds even when he’s not talking.  You dread the next slab of orotund voiceover and the anticipation of it gets in the way of the images (because you start imagining what the narrator will have to say about them).   Although he acknowledges – mainly through the words of famous writers – the ambivalence-cum-fraudulence of nostalgia, Davies’s script is so solemnly dogmatic that you never feel that he accepts this emotionally.  His delivery of the lines is unvarying and inflexible – it’s soon clear that he lacks the ability (or willingness) to speak casually, let alone the humility which might allow him to admit the contradictions in his recollections in an appealing way.

When Davies deplores the wedding of ‘Betty Windsor’ in 1947 as a waste of public money that kept the poor in poverty, he might at least deflate his pomposity by adding, ‘I was only two years old so I didn’t feel outrage at the time but I do now’.  There are comfortable chuckles in the Richmond Filmhouse when he excoriates, as well as the royal family, the Catholic church in which he was raised.  (He prayed passionately – ‘till my knees bled’ – to be cured of his homosexuality.  It’s not clear whether he came to realise religion is ‘a big lie’ because the prayers didn’t work.)  The audience seems a bit startled when he has a go at the Beatles too and this is certainly the only one of Davies’s assaults that has any surprise or lèse-majesté charge.  Davies accuses them of banishing the ‘well-crafted love song’.  Although there’s a cursory mention of ‘Presley’,  the Beatles seem to have achieved this act of cultural vandalism – and the creation of ‘rock and roll’ (whose advent, Davies says, turned him to classical music) – quite independently.  Theirs is an original sin unqualified by cultural movements or influences.   Davies makes the point by showing archive of the Beatles and hysterical fans with ‘The Hippy Hippy Shake’ on the soundtrack.  The decision not to score these images with one of the Beatles’ many well-crafted love songs is fair enough.  Davies is being tendentious and you can accept that Mersey Beat not only eclipsed types of pop music that he loved but also violated his sense of home.  But the film would be more honest and likeable if he could say, ‘I’d got over it by 1969, which is why I used “He’s Not Heavy, He’s My Brother” to accompany some newsreel of the Korean war 10 minutes ago – but then the Hollies were from Manchester’.

The opening statements about mixed and self-deceiving perspectives on one’s past and roots are a clever tactic.  They allow Davies to say what he likes, as dogmatically as he likes, and for everything to be circumscribed – in effect justified – by the caveat that retrospection is a complicated business.  But how much are people likely to take Davies’s words as qualified because confused feelings are acknowledged to be part of the texture of memory – especially when his own words are buttressed by the words of, to name a few, Housman, Shelley, Joyce, Engels, Jung, T S Eliot and Shakespeare?   (Davies names only a few of his scriptwriters:  he attributes some lines but not others.)   He reads extracts from Four Quartets as if quoting from a piece of continuous writing.  In fact, he’s stitched together bits of each of ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’ and ‘Little Gidding’ (and maybe ‘The Dry Salvages’ too, although I don’t recall his using words from this).  It’s a free country – but how much of his audience realise that he’s selecting in this way to intensify (and simplify) the effect of his narrative?  And this isn’t a consequence of deceptive memory – it’s self-serving sampling of a great poet (who, like it or not, was a determinedly Christian one when he wrote Four Quartets).

There are other – lesser but instructive – suggestions of Davies’s manipulating the words at his disposal.   There’s a sequence about 1950s Grand Nationals.  Davies lovingly intones the names of remembered horses and recalls (‘even’) his mother having an annual flutter on the race but I couldn’t help noticing that the horses mentioned were all National winners – Sundew, Teal, Early Mist, Quare Times.  If this was genuine family lore (rather than choosing names retrospectively from the roll of honour), mightn’t there be a perennial loser in there somewhere?   And Quare Times (‘each way’) seems too apt a choice, given the prominence of Davies’s tortured gay soul in the narrative.  Davies occasionally has to stretch the film’s geography to make his point.  It’s a relief to hear a Julian and Sandy excerpt from Round the Horne.  When Davies’s voice then intrudes glumly to announce that real life for homosexuals in the 1950s was no laughing matter, he has to quote the judge in a prosecution in London to get the message across – and a laugh, albeit a bitter one.  (All in all, London – as the location of royal family extravaganzas too – has a lot to answer for here.)

As we were leaving the Filmhouse, two women were saying to each other how moving and ‘quite sad’ they’d found Of Time and the City.  I found it unmoving as a personal ‘love song and a eulogy to the people of Liverpool’ (as the trailer describes it).  The film is emotionally powerful because of the poignancy of the images and the potency of the music, and what these evoke in your own experience and memory.  When Davies plays Fauré’s ‘Dolly Suite’ over footage of laughing infants, most people of his and my generation are going to feel a pang at hearing the signature music of Listen With Mother used with these visuals – although it’s irritating that happy faces rarely appear elsewhere in the film, in deference to Davies’s evident view that time wipes the smile off everyone’s face.  The main adult exceptions to the rule of looking miserable are a crowd watching the stars arrive at a film premiere (which Davies seems to endorse because Hollywood was to him magically transformative) – and people of all ages enjoying a street party for the scandalous coronation of Betty Windsor.  Because people are moved by Of Time and the City, they will naturally tend to think the writer-director has moved them.  He has to the extent that he has skilfully put together images and pieces of music (and singing – a feature of Davies’s earlier, fictionalised autobiographical films).  I can’t accept that he’s moved audiences through his interfering narrative or through what the music and images mean to him.   The breathily insistent voice is monotonously passionate but, in terms of what really counts emotionally in the film, it’s superfluous.

One of the most striking passages describes the demolition of old, poor housing in Liverpool and its replacement by tower blocks.  ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’ plays on the soundtrack.  The juxtaposition may sound facilely sarcastic – but I didn’t experience it that way.  When Peggy Lee sings ‘On a hilltop high’, the note of wistful aspiration is so affecting that it seems to chime with the well-meaning social ambition that lay behind the development of high-rise flats.   Most of the footage of people going about their domestic business in terraced streets is lovingly and regretfully presented – a montage of windows being cleaned suggests the sacred rite of a now extinct tribe.  But this is complemented by shots where the camera ascends to the tops of tower blocks as if to show them, albeit ironically, aiming in the same direction as church spires.  The effect is to make you think that Davies is honestly ambivalent on this subject.  When he returns to it later in the film, however, he’s more explicit:  ‘We were looking for paradise; what we got was the anus mundi’.   He deplores municipal architecture as ‘bad at best but when combined with the British genius for creating the dismal … ‘.     Davies is just such a ‘genius’.  This can only be a prejudiced guess (the determined gloom of Distant Voices, Still Lives caused us to walk out after half an hour – and Of Time and City is my first exposure to Davies since 1989) but I suspect the admiring reception of his work by critics and at film festivals is thanks largely to its distinctive, localised dismalness.  His script here is humourless – the few jokes are feeble and, although Davies describes comic aspects of social convention, he’s no Alan Bennett.  Davies may be, as he says in the narration, proudly atheist.  He still makes a cinema audience feel they’re in church.

2 November 2008