The Long Day Closes

Terence Davies, UK, 1992, 95 minutes

This film, the sequel to Distant Voices, Still Lives, takes up the story of director Terence Davies' childhood in 1956, a few years after the death of his father. Compared to the earlier film, it is a much lighter, more optimistic work (one need only contrast the Hollywood-fantasy Christmas dinner with the analogous scene in Distant Voices), but still Bud, Davies' alter ego, is a lonely child, isolated in a fantasy world constructed out of popular songs, snatches of movie dialogue and faintly homoerotic Catholic iconography.

The style of the film is a fascinating blend between an unwavering naturalism in the performances, and a suggestively unreal stylisation in much of the mise-en-scene, as when church becomes cinema in a memorable overhead tracking shot. These allegorical leaps allow the film to escape the confines of strictly historical and autobiographical authenticity, and attain a near-mythological universality - this is the childhood not just of Terence Davies, but of anyone who has ever sat in a cinema, anyone who has ever dreamed.

Review by Richard Dewes
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93