Terence Davies, C/D. S/D

A general thread (esp since I'm utterly meh on his House of Mirth), a general roundup:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/terence-davies-in-america

Sawe him do a Q&A after The Deep Blue Sea (which is good but not revelatory) with Rachel Weisz last night. He sure does like to remind people that he hates rock n' roll. He also mentioned Joan Fontaine and Doris Day in the first 2 minutes.

Why does he keep returning to the early '50s? "Because that's the last time I was happy."

The Long Day Closes is playing here this week -- looks intriguing.

(Haven't seen any of his films.)

Of Time and the City worth watching to hear Davis' pompous sonorosities in voice-over.

Love THOM.

in Brooklyn retro will finally get to see Distant Voices, Still Lives

it's all time, for me. an absolute masterpiece.

Yup, I would also say anyone should catch A long Day Closes. There are some beautiful songs in it -- a type of ethnograhic cinema.

Why does he keep returning to the early '50s? "Because that's the last time I was happy."

He is a child of the war, austerity and BBC Radio's Third Programme. From what he says he wasn't that happy until he met his partner about 15 years ago (?) By all accounts he had a brutal upbringing, but its a case of what he knows.

his Sunday NYT interview said he's been celibate for 30 years?

I took it as meaning these last 30 years.

Yes, he has a partner, but he is still celibate and has been so for that long.

Jeez, and yet he claims to no longer be Catholic...

Shit stays w/you!

Its not just about that -- from the interview I saw he did talk about some painful experineces in the gay scene of the time as well...

what jed said. Distant Voices Still Lives is probably one of the best British films ever, I think

The best I can say about The Deep Blue Sea is that it isn't as bad as Of Time and the City. At least is looks gorgeous but really it isn't good. I'd be amazed, but thrilled, if he ever made another good film.

yeah i don't have high hopes for this one.

littl thread-bomb?

Don't think he's made a really great film since Long Day Closes?

Deep Blue Sea was gd for getting to see Rachel Weisz in a meatier role (like Keira in a Dangerous Method).

But it ws good - the source material is a bit thin overall. Story w/potential but sorta ran out of gas..

TDBS is a significant improvement over the two earlier adaps, I think.

i really liked The House of Mirth and i like it even more each time i see it.

one of the main problems with the deep blue sea was the that the weird unnatural acting of the guy who played freddie rendered him ridiculous and made it unbelievable that weiss would be interested in him in any way. i don't blame the actor though, it's clearly davies' fault that he's so bad. also i just didn't get it. i couldn't understand what the film was supposed to be about. davies clearly gets so close to his material, and so passionate about it, that he doesn't realise that he's doing some things that only make sense to him and will just confuse the audience. he doesn't have enough distance on the material so sit back and put himself in the audience's place. i'm thinking of the fractured structure of TDBS particularly.

House of Mirth didn't make much of an impression on me at the time...I'll revisit.

re: TDBS...well, Freddie was a 'dashing' pilot who seemed quite funny/charming -- at least that's what I infer from that scene at the pub where he and his friend are seeking to impress w/their tales of aerial combat. Then you have her husband who ws 'nice' and yet allows the mother-in-law to put her down.

Obv this was thinly skethed out, and I agree the fractured structure adds nothing to the story.

Guess what registered w/me ws the need for passion in one's life, taking risks that won't come off but carrying on regardless. That drive towards one's own destruction has always been a topic I'm attracted to.

Since then I've seen Dreyer's Gertrud. Its a similar topic but there is so much more to it -- what you have there are long takes, conversations where no matter how much is said and thrashed out doesn't alter first principles which are never deviated from, with no regrets. Its a bit of a joke that they were established when the character ws 15. Then again many are indoctrinated w/a faith and never doubt so perhaps its a comment on that, knowing what Dreyer gets up to in his other films.

What Dreyer and Davies resolve to also is the essential unknowability of relationships from people on the outside looking in. TDBS is much worse at this, again the structure gets in the way.

also the "nice" husband is clearly gay but not in a way that seems to leave any impression on the story. i thought freddie seemed more annoying/unreal than funny or charming. like that armstrong and miller sketch with the pilots. of course, there was lots of acting like this in old stiff-upper-lip films but it's out of kilter because weiss (who is very good in this and very, very beautiful at 40) is acting much more naturalistically.

i'll check out gertrud though, cheers.

weisz, sorry.

she makes me swoon.

http://shropshirescreen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/The-Deep-Blue-Sea-31-650x432.jpg

The other thing about Freddie is that he has his issues/damaged by the war etc. so the cliche goes about saving a person.

RW's existence didn't register w/me prior to this (not too surprising, she seems to turn up in films I won't see) but yes - something we can all agree on...that scene at the gallery 'broke' me.

also the "nice" husband is clearly gay

Don't get this and it seems clearly not intended by the filmmakers; the only eay I could understand it is if you think Simon Russell Beale, who is gay, is a lousy actor. But he just seemed British to me.

Davies explaine the other night with a bit of an eyeroll that ALL the first acts of Rattigan's plays are exposition. Since it starts with the suicide attempt, which anhors the rest of the plot, you really couldn't do it in strict chronological order. I'm finishing my piece on this today so maybe I'll say more later, but I do think the two scenes w/ William's mother (both invented by Davies) were one too many...

...I mean, the husband COULD be gay, but there are other explanations. And one would presume Hester would know on some level, and therefore her dilemma would be no dilemma.

"How were you conceived? Willpower?" is a funny line though.

i guess the reason i'm not being too optimistic about this is because the criticisms that have been made of TDBS resonate with me in terms of my feelings about davies' work after the long day closes. i actually thought house of mirth was not bad, just kind of cripplingly miscast (eric stoltz, dan ackroyd, laura linney, and to a lesser extent gillian anderson). the liverpool film i thought was flabby and formless, i did not care for it at all. neon bible is gorgeous but ultimately kind of flat -- i'm wondering if i'll have the same reaction to this.

but, if it is some kind of return to form i'll be very happy. like everybody else in the world, apparently, his first few films (the shorts + DVSL + LDC) are among my favorite things.

I can take or leave Ackroyd in THOM but I think the exact opposite: it's alarmingly well cast, especially Linney and Stolz. I'm biased too by knowing the novel fairly well.

The novel really is incredible.

I really didn't find Hiddleston and Beale's acting chord much diff from Weisz... I think if you tried to go any more 'naturalistic' w/ Rattigan's dialogue you'd be in trouble.

yeah i read the novel in one feverish night and day. it is astounding. it's not that the actors were or weren't approximations of the characters in the book, it's just that they seem jarring and uncomfortable (to me anyway) in the film.

the gay noir that davies was trying to make in the early-mid 90s -- vile bodies -- i wonder if that's ever going to happen.

btw NOT an evelyn waugh adaptation

damn, I just saw the Trilogy for the second time and forgot what unalloyed misery it is....and often not in good ways; glad he got that out of his system. (and heh, the Beatles hater killed McCartney's grandfather)

nice interview:

The problem with film is that it's always in the eternal present. When you cut, you always read it as "this is the next thing that happened." What do you do if you actually dissolve? Or you cut and then dissolve? What does that mean? It begins to change the nature of how we perceive time. But it's closest, I think, to music. You don't have to be a musician to follow a symphonic argument. If you love the music, you'll follow it. My great love is Anton Bruckner. There's a wonderful moment in the 7th Symphony where there's a huge climax to this wonderful tune, and then there's a pause, and then the tune returns on first violins, like a long long echo of what we've just heard. Your inner ear has been waiting for some kind of resolution, but it wasn't waiting for that. It's devastating. It's so moving and so beautiful and I think you can do that with film. You can deny expectation, but you've always got to imply that expectations are going to be satisfied; but, not necessarily in the way that you were expecting it. That's what makes things interesting.

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/memory-as-mise-en-scene-a-conversation-with-terence-davies

DVSL is my fave British film ever by miles. still amazing to me that just 5 or so years back it had been out of print since the early 1990s on VHS and *never* available on DVD.
i can't recommend the BFI Classics book enough either.

man i've always really wanted a poster of it and there's an amazing one here. £40's not bad either i guess.. http://norwichfilmposters.com/foreign_and_non_quad.htm

more review links in the Mubi post up top

Good interview with a local critic.

he appears to have been swallowed by The Hunger Games. (alas just like at the b.o.)

i interviewed him a few years ago about of time and the city: http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/032609/film1.html (that first photo caption appears to be a hilarious mistake.)

The actress who plays the big-boned, jokey friend of the older sister in DV,SL is brilliant, yet she seems to have no other film credits.

In that film, the BAM audience laughed in semi-astonishment at the pub singalong of "Stone Cold Dead in the Market," a song w/ which I am very familiar from WFMU airplay over the years. A pointed inclusion in a film w/ wifebeating tho.

yes, she is fantastic in the film. so much of this has entered my consciousness. e.g. the moment where the girls reunite and they sing "they tried to sell us egg foo-yung" to the tune of the old nat king cole song "too young". a beautiful moment that says so much about the shared language of friendship.

also

-"How much do you love me, Mam?"
-"A pound of sugar."

song is usually called "brownskin gal" btw

love the banter between big-boned girl and her short husband. they constantly insult each other, yet clearly love each other as much as anyone in the movie.

sounds to me like they were doing a medley of "Brownskin Gal" and this one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Cold_Dead_in_the_Market_(He_Had_It_Coming)

The music almost belted me out of the theater, and boy, he loves the chiaroscuro but this was quite moving in places. I'd no problem with Hiddleston and Weisz, although I often wondered what she was supposed to project. I also didn't think Hester's husband was queer; he looked honestly besotted with her, if confused about where to put it in.

The creakiness of Rattigan's theater devices is amusing now: the inconveniently found letter, the husband stumbling into the phone call, the dowager mom getting laughs from scowling.

oh, I breezed through the text recently, you'd love the landlady and neighbors providing the entire backstory in Act I.

But um, the phone call stumble and the mother's two scenes are entirely Davies' invention.

Damn.

Brand new creakiness!

Sorry, that's garbled but you know what I mean.

Cynthia Nixon is absolutely amazing in this, and her comic timing is impeccable and surprisingly central in the film. It's definitely one of year's best. When will you all get to see it so I don't have to rant alone?

Amateurist, I realise that the incorrect words to ALS mean nothing to 95% of the audience and I don't want to beat a dead horse but, for what it's worth, the Variety review of A Quiet Passion, which I have just read, complains:

The wisdom of covering Dickinson’s entire adult life, as opposed to a judiciously chosen and dramatically crucial passage thereof, is most sorely tested when the Battle of Gettysburg rolls around: Though understandably budget-strapped, Davies questionably elects to cover it with a kind of cinematic PowerPoint presentation of colorized photographs, adding insult to injury by closing the montage on a shot of an inaccurately over-spangled American flag.

(Admittedly, probably the production designer's fault)

oof!

Nah, that reviewer misses every willful anachronism but one, then complains about that one as if it ruins the whole movie. Also calls Jessica Hauser's askance compositions 'symmetrical', so is clearly blind.

This movie is WEIRD, and the images of flags are awesome.

i liked AQP fine til the two long death scenes. Dude loves death.

Keith Carradine only actor who knew how they pronounce "aunt" in Massachusetts tho.

Very oddly for me I just saw TWO Terence Davies films in two days.

A QUIET PASSION wasn't quite what I expected from TD but at least it had quality dialogue with tons of barbed back & forth put-downs. I had never known that Emily Dickinson was supposed to be so witty.

Then DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES. I had never known before that it was in two parts. I preferred the STILL LIVES. DISTANT VOICES was somewhat dominated by the father who was not pleasant. I'm not sure I understood this film or got much from it, except from the moments when the young women talked to each other - their talk was vivacious and colourful, unlike most of the rest of the film. But on reflection I think: I ought to welcome attempts to make films that work and tell stories in unusual and different ways.

Dickinson's letters are marvelous.

I have read a load of articles about her over the years, but that element never came through. Watching the film, I assumed that the wit must be drawn from letters, not just made up by TD.

I'm not sure the poems came across so well in the film - not always sure of Nixon's delivery of them (though she would surely be advised and directed on that), and hearing them without seeing them made them harder to follow anyway.

Interview: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-terence-davies-a-quiet-passion-interview-20170502-htmlstory.html

I had a qualm or two but overall AQP impressed me.

out on disc etc

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/a-quiet-passion

Excellen film.

*Excellent

I'm watching it again this Saturday night, appropriately sober this time.

well maybe not that much, but not shitfaced!

LOL Cal!

Cal's quiet passion.

New one about Siegfried Sassoon opens on Friday. I'm watching it tonight. Anyone seen it yet?

Benediction is brilliant. I keep thinking about some of the hilariously vicious and cold dialogue from Novello and that very sad parting of ways when Wilfred Owen is packed off to his death. TD has still got it, man!

Film of the year imo

it really makes you think of regret and seemingly innocuous moments of mild drama in life that haunt you for the rest of your life. It's a great movie.

like you get a strong sense of that one short moment of mild class condescension towards Owen is something Sassoon regretted for the rest of his life.

Any film that brings the three of us together.

Davies has become a whiz at showing the passage of time: how it happens without your being aware of it, as the hurts linger.

I’ve somehow studiously avoided Davies all these years, but finally watched Summer Song last week and was hooked. I’ve been baptized, I’ve been baptized.

Ahem, Sunset Song

Sunset Song got criticised on here because the Auld Lang Syne in it wasn't authentically Scottish enough! I'm not beefing about it, it just amused me at the time.

People seemed to like it on my Scottish language thread, despite or because of having to read the book in school. Or maybe it’s just the book they liked.

So why did you go to the Impressionists?
I only did it for the Monet.

We’re here to enjoy ourselves. Come on, Micky, give us a song.

Quite lovely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS-boGJ8hd0

RIP

fun list

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyGrwkrIsTH/

i still think about my favorite professor showing us distant voices, still lives at byu. did he know the queer, closeted kids in the class needed to see it? was he somewhat queer himself? probably a little bit of yes to both. it was all so unspoken though.

Loved this bit from Michael Koresky:

At the conclusion of that deeply nurturing conversation, as I was nervously pressing stop on my audio recorder, Davies then looked up at me with a warm smile and asked, “So… what is your book about?” Concerned and amazed, I responded: “You! The book is about you.” Davies’ face turned red and lit up like a child, delighted but also humbled beyond belief.

“Me?!” It was an expression of unbelievable modesty coming from a man many agree was England’s greatest filmmaker of the last quarter century, but also evidence that Davies, never a commercially successful director in all the boring ways we measure such things, was always on the edge of being forgotten. It’s impossible to imagine, however, that Davies’ cinema will ever be forgotten by anyone who has seen a frame of it; his monumental films held candles as vigils to the form itself, and now without him, we will – we must – keep that flame burning.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/terence-davies-obituary

MK is living the life I wish I was. He’s the perfect person to pay homage to this particular director

I'll watch his last couple of films. Really hope Davies is not forgotten :-(

My obt for him.

Some nice memories here:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/oct/11/terence-davies-tom-hiddleston-rachel-weisz-jennifer-ehle-peter-capaldi?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1bF7DkZskET2ghvSB4za-cE6oQhHuC1GwtlA7_lK1zMJTfmIozv3MRDaQ

So lovely - the Capaldi contribution particularly.

Yes, that was great, thanks!

I'm getting the Koresky book from the library, this aspect of the description sounded really intriguing:

focusing on four paradoxes within the director's oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space.

Koresky's good.

I have a mega critic-crush on him

I don’t know from him, just heard about him now on this thread. His book Films of Endearment has a cheesy title but maybe it’s good?

I loved it, but as I said above ...

Glancing at it. Looks good. Had a shock for a minute when he said his mother went to Newton High and I misread it as Newtown High.