The Long Day Closes [1992] [DVD]

With the release of Terence Davies's "The Long Day Closes", the BFI are continuing to ensure that the work of Britain's greatest living film-maker is finally made available on DVD.

The undoubted highpoint of this particular DVD is its beautiful transfer, which was overseen by the film's cinematographer Michael Coulter, and by Davies himself. And I do not think this visually ravishing film has ever looked better than it does on this DVD, which also contains a superb commentary by Davies and Coulter, some illuminating footage of Davies directing, and an interesting interview with the film's production designer Christopher Hobbs (who also designed the director's follow-up film "The Neon Bible"). These last two items are both taken from a South Bank Show about Davies that was shown in the early 1990s, and I hope it is not asking too much to say that it would be really great if the BFI could release this on DVD at some point; on the forthcoming DVD of Davies's new film "Of Time and the City", perhaps?

As for the film itself, it remains - in my very humble opinion - one of the best films ever made. It is surely one of the greatest films about childhood, up there with Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" in its evocation of the joy, terror, and plain confusion of being young. It is very similar to "Distant Voices, Still Lives" in a number of ways. It is about life in Davies's family in 1950s Liverpool after his father had died. It has a structure that is more circular than linear. It is full of lovely music, classical and popular. And it is filmed in the director's trademark style: careful compositions, luminous dissolves, and elliptical, geography-defying tracking shots, which take us from a cinema to a funfair, and from Christmas to New Year and back to Christmas, seemingly in one single take. The result is breathtaking.

But unlike "Distant Voices, Still Lives", the focus of this film is the younger Davies himself, here christened with the resonant name "Bud". The film concentrates on a single period in his life, a period when, even though he was very happy, his childhood innocence was suffering small but significant erosions - from school, from the church, and from his own developing sexuality. Never before has a film portrayed this process of erosion with such subtlety and power.

I could go on, but you get the general idea. This film is a total cracker, and I would like to thank the BFI most heartily for giving it this excellent DVD release!

The director describes the inner life of a young boy with a series of poignant and moving images that often get lost as we grow older. The family is beautifully drawn, and yet it is as though we are watching ghosts filtered through the young boy's dream-like existence. There is a beautiful scene, very short, where the boy looks from the house window and sees his brother, stripped to the waist, building a wall. Through brilliant direction and acting we know that the boy is filled with love and admiration for his brother, admiration for him as a beautiful man and love for him as his brother, as well as an almost primitive knowledge that things pass, that this moment will be gone. In the heightened, emotional life of the child where everything is highly significant, there is a poignant gap between the strange adult world and this precious small moment.
In a way this film describes how the limited view of the child, confined by the street, school, his friend, makes a whole universe in itself that is larger than the world of the adults around him, despite their mystique, their perceived freedom. At the end of the film the boy and his friend see themselves as part of the mysteries of the universe. They can make the natural leap from the small tragedies of their childhood world and the warm confines of a bustling working class household to the stars and planets that an inspired teacher has introduced them to. They can make that link. A masterpiece.

Through the use of music,soundtracks of films,minimal dialogue,imaginative lighting and camerawork,the director Terence Davies recreates the lost world of his childhood in 1950s Liverpool. The film is nostalgic but never sentimental and Davies has the marvelous gift of making the mundane poetic.Quite simply a masterpiece and a film that deserves to be better known. It should be in anybodies 100 best films of all time: it's certainly in mine.