Distant Voices, Still Lives (15.)
Directed by Terrence Davies. 1988.
Starring Freda Dowie, Dean Williams, Peter Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Lorraine Ashbourne and Debi Jones. 82 mins. 30th Anniversary re-release.
DVSL, a glacial drift over a working-class upbringing in Liverpool in the 40s and 50s, is one of the great sacred cows of British subsidised cinema. It was greeted by rapturous acclaim on its release in 1988 and I can still recall the rush of emotion I felt while watching it: the anger and contempt I had for this empty and patronising film and the aloof, out of touch critical elite that had gyped me out of the price of admission, anything up to £2.50 in those days.
I'll admit that I've been carrying a hatchet for its director, Whisperin' Terence Davies, ever since. I've delighted in his subsequent career setbacks, his constant struggles to find finance, and infuriated by his whining on the inequities of this. I still fume at his dismissal of Steve Coogan, Peter Kay and Ricky Gervais as third rate, riled by his sense of injustice that backing had been found for A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Tristram Shandy with Coogan and Rob Brydon, rather than whatever precious trudge he had set his heart on.
To be fair, his most recent films – Sunset Song, A Quiet Passion - have been decent, though I take some snide satisfaction in this great visionary making costume dramas based on literary works, the most boring and obvious genre for a British director to work in.
Three decades on I am suitably desteamed to look at DVSL again with balanced eyes. A mosaic constructed of incidental moments the film tries to replicate the sense of memory; events flow back and forth in time mixing the big events (weddings and deaths) with those random, trivial images that get retained. In the first part, Distant Voices, we are centred in the terraced home of the Davies family, intermittently terrified by their father's (Postlethwaite) unprovoked rages but held together by its saintly mother (Dowie) and their Catholic faith. In Still Lives (made two years after) the three children leave home, start to make their way in the world.
There is something lovely in the way it sidetracks the restrictions of drama. Anger explodes but is left unexplained, and we move on to a bit of housework. I really like the idea of DVSL, and in its second half Still Lives the execution is more accomplished and it comes within touching distance of the masterpiece that is intended. But, and with all due allowances made for the pittance with which it was filmed and the wild ambition of what it is attempting, I don't see genius in the filmmaking. He's painstaking but these compositions and camera movements don't have that gasp of wonder when something is executed perfectly.
The film wants to be something greater than the sum of its part. To be an overwhelming encapsulation of experience, the resilience of strong women married to berkish angry men, of communities held together by sing songs. In capturing the dull grinding repetition and the enclosed horizons of these lives, this brief film does become at points a test of your endurance.
It's those songs, those bloody songs. I'm amazed the BFI haven't put out a Singalongadistantvoicestillives version. Whether your Sinatra in High Society or a busker belting out Wonderwall in Piccadilly Circus at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning, there is always an element of affront in the bursting out in song. There aren't many spokes on the DVSL wheel of misfortune – cup of tea, domestic abuse, sing a song, cleaning, sunlight coming through net curtains, sing a song, domestic abuse, have a ciggy, sing a song – that it can't help but be reductive. The autobiographical look back at childhood is generally an attempt for the artist to lift themselves clear of their upbringing, to set themselves to one side from the common herd. You really see this in his Of Time And The City, but in DVSL it struck me then, and still does now, that what is intended as affection comes across as disdain. Taken out of their lives, stripped of contexts, the characters become mannequins in a series of shop window displays.
Directed by Terrence Davies. 1988.
Starring Freda Dowie, Dean Williams, Peter Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Lorraine Ashbourne and Debi Jones. 82 mins. 30th Anniversary re-release.
DVSL, a glacial drift over a working-class upbringing in Liverpool in the 40s and 50s, is one of the great sacred cows of British subsidised cinema. It was greeted by rapturous acclaim on its release in 1988 and I can still recall the rush of emotion I felt while watching it: the anger and contempt I had for this empty and patronising film and the aloof, out of touch critical elite that had gyped me out of the price of admission, anything up to £2.50 in those days.
I'll admit that I've been carrying a hatchet for its director, Whisperin' Terence Davies, ever since. I've delighted in his subsequent career setbacks, his constant struggles to find finance, and infuriated by his whining on the inequities of this. I still fume at his dismissal of Steve Coogan, Peter Kay and Ricky Gervais as third rate, riled by his sense of injustice that backing had been found for A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Tristram Shandy with Coogan and Rob Brydon, rather than whatever precious trudge he had set his heart on.
To be fair, his most recent films – Sunset Song, A Quiet Passion - have been decent, though I take some snide satisfaction in this great visionary making costume dramas based on literary works, the most boring and obvious genre for a British director to work in.
Three decades on I am suitably desteamed to look at DVSL again with balanced eyes. A mosaic constructed of incidental moments the film tries to replicate the sense of memory; events flow back and forth in time mixing the big events (weddings and deaths) with those random, trivial images that get retained. In the first part, Distant Voices, we are centred in the terraced home of the Davies family, intermittently terrified by their father's (Postlethwaite) unprovoked rages but held together by its saintly mother (Dowie) and their Catholic faith. In Still Lives (made two years after) the three children leave home, start to make their way in the world.
There is something lovely in the way it sidetracks the restrictions of drama. Anger explodes but is left unexplained, and we move on to a bit of housework. I really like the idea of DVSL, and in its second half Still Lives the execution is more accomplished and it comes within touching distance of the masterpiece that is intended. But, and with all due allowances made for the pittance with which it was filmed and the wild ambition of what it is attempting, I don't see genius in the filmmaking. He's painstaking but these compositions and camera movements don't have that gasp of wonder when something is executed perfectly.
The film wants to be something greater than the sum of its part. To be an overwhelming encapsulation of experience, the resilience of strong women married to berkish angry men, of communities held together by sing songs. In capturing the dull grinding repetition and the enclosed horizons of these lives, this brief film does become at points a test of your endurance.
It's those songs, those bloody songs. I'm amazed the BFI haven't put out a Singalongadistantvoicestillives version. Whether your Sinatra in High Society or a busker belting out Wonderwall in Piccadilly Circus at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning, there is always an element of affront in the bursting out in song. There aren't many spokes on the DVSL wheel of misfortune – cup of tea, domestic abuse, sing a song, cleaning, sunlight coming through net curtains, sing a song, domestic abuse, have a ciggy, sing a song – that it can't help but be reductive. The autobiographical look back at childhood is generally an attempt for the artist to lift themselves clear of their upbringing, to set themselves to one side from the common herd. You really see this in his Of Time And The City, but in DVSL it struck me then, and still does now, that what is intended as affection comes across as disdain. Taken out of their lives, stripped of contexts, the characters become mannequins in a series of shop window displays.
