The Long Day Closes

Summer vacation in Liverpool in 1955. Eleven-year-old Bud discovers the world of film and music. Happy days filled with going to the movies and a radio that is always on. In Bud's family there is love and affection. But life is obscured when Bud enters a new school. He struggles to adapt. The Long Day Closes is a film about the art of being happy, happy about nothing in particular.

Comment:
The Englishman Terence Davies made his breakthrough as director a few years ago with the lyrical film Still Voices, Distant Lives. This was a cinematic elegy of family life, childhood, the back streets of the big city and the dreams of popular culture. The subject was highly autobiographical. In his new film, The Long Day Closes, Davies again traces these traumas and joys of his own childhood. The film is a co-production of the British Film Institute and Channel Four; a sucessful cooperation which among other films produced Philip Saville's excellent Fellow Traveller a year or so ago.
The story deals with eleven year old Bud - Davies himself - and his life in Liverpool during the years 1955 and '56. The harmony of the home - the overwhelming love shown by the mother and older sisters and brothers - stands in sharp contrast to the experiences of terror, beating, educational cramming and bullying at school. The Long Day Closes s mostly a series of low-key fragments that in visual form duplicate the joy of childhood. In this sense the flm differs from the typically British tradition of mainly showing the terrors of childhood.
Just as in Distant Voices... the imagery is stylized with exquisiste studioreproductions and ambigious cuts. Davies seems to have developed a style of his own, which despite its many points of contact with British film in general, still conveys a personal vision.
The child's point of view is brought out of above all with the help of the sound filmstrip. The old popular songs - ''My Foolish Heart'' and ''Stardust'' - are used both to re-create the spirit of the time and to reflect Bud's emotional state. Besides popular music, movies play a decisive part in Bud's development. Sound cuts from various classics return throughout the film: Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Vincente Minelli's Meet Me in St. Louis, Robet Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets and David Lean's Great Expectations. Just as in Dennis Potter's TV-series The Singing Detective, the favorites of a popular culture long passed come to express a deeply penetrating subjectivity. It is original, effective and emotionally charged.
Erik Hedling

Medverkande
Marjorie Yates, Leigh McCormack: Producent
Olivia Stewart: Manus
Terence Davies: Foto
Michael Coulter: Musik
BobLast: Talat språk
English