Distant Voices, Still Lives [1988]

 British filmmaker Terence Davies’ feature-length debut, Distant Voices, Still Lives, continuously switched between bitter, mournful memories and gregarious displays of life in the here and now, and between private and public spaces. These intersecting aspects, along with Davies’ decision to replace linear recounting with a heavily impressionistic approach, instilled this heavily autobiographical film with formal rigour and poetic realism that were curiously at odds with its mythologizing of war-time and post-war working-class Britain and splashes of melodrama. Incidentally, this was two shorts rolled into one considering that its two interconnected halves “Distant Voices” and “Still Lives” were filmed two years apart and made with different crews, albeit with the same set of actors. It’s foregrounded on a Liverpudlian family – a stoic mother (Freda Dowie), two daughters (Angela Walsh and Lorraine Ashbourne) and son (Dean Williams) – that lived under the scarring shadows of an abusive and violent patriarch (Pete Postlethwaite), and continues to bear that trauma even after his death, which formed a pivotal juncture for them and divided their lives into a before and an after. Their oppressive interiority within their dreary, cramped home was frequently alternated with moments spent with friends and family in taverns and public houses, drinking beer and breaking into popular songs of that time. The communal power of music, in fact, formed a key theme. The cinematography, with its washed-out and desaturated colours, exquisitely evoked a lost time and space that exists through the subjective prism of memories, while the long, gently panning shots captured the calm and the chaos. The mannered acting and lack of any redeeming qualities of the brutish father, fleeting displays of gentleness notwithstanding, marginally dampened this deeply personal work.

Director: Terence Davies

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Musical/Coming-of-Age

Language: English

Country: UK