Review of The Long Day Closes (1992) by Nick O — 07 Feb 2014

Give or take an R, it'd be easy to relate Terence Davies with Terrence Malick. Both are masters of elegiac camerawork and understanding the complexities of nature and memory. Davies especially, though, excels at capturing a specific region. His features have Ken Loach's day-in-a-life/life-in-a-day authenticity and texture. The only other film of Davies' I'd seen until now was 2012's "The Deep Blue Sea", and one thing's for sure: you know a Davies shot when you're endlessly entranced in one. Immaculately layered as a dense, ambient, bird's-eye card shuffle of the childhood of one eleven-year-old Liverpool lad Bud (Leigh McCormack), "The Long Day Closes" has some of the most perfectly constructed framing of any movie I've probably ever seen. I guess Davies wants you to feel the slow-bake of boyhood and lazy weekend afternoons.

Another major theme outside of a great slice of coming-of-age tale is entertainment and how people would bide their time in the 1950s. Radio dramas, sparse film dialogue, gospel and pop songs all appear on the soundtrack. There's a real sense of togetherness here. Bud's family sings a lot, his mother (Marjorie Yates) in particular, and singing as much as cinema haunts "The Long Day Closes". Davies has such a unique imagining of era and place and how they compare to eternally universal emotions, it's beguiling. And yeah, like Malick the intimacy in his escapism is meant to evoke subjectively as well as objectively. Crazy to think Davies kind of made his "The Tree of Life" more than a decade before Malick did his, or at least so impeccably partnered the razor-edge social realism of the French New Wave with a more poetic, precise and personal Hollywood Mulholland drive. Nothing bereft of a masterpiece. (100/100).