Terence Davies' "The House of Mirth" - Classic or Dud?

I think the problem with OT&TC is that it was made by a self-satisfied bore. Let me expand for a moment on the extraordinary poverty of this acclaimed film.

Maybe we should be warned by the portentous title (it’s really not much of a city film – but that 'of'!), and by the lazy strapline 'a love song and a memory' – this is not good. From the small audience watching it alongside me, some walk out midway. Archive footage, pretty average, nothing you couldn’t see elsewhere. The most standout footage is of young people at clubs and bars today – again, nothing too special, but more appealing and moving to me than any other pictures here. Davies’ narrating voice (carrying no trace of Liverpool - which may be an original twist, more surprising than having Ringo or Michael Angelis do it in a sense, but also rather distances you from the city which never comes alive in this picture anyway) is obnoxious, full of histrionic spitting which I suppose is supposed to be funny – but it never is funny, for the self-satisfied script is so dreadfully banal and ill-written.

He smugly attributes lines to writers like Joyce and Chekhov – but they’re lines that don’t reflect those writers’ talent at all. He quotes great chunks of Four Quartets: OK, it’s about Time, but what a lazy way to talk about time - to fill time, indeed, to kill screen time; and what does TSE have to do with Liverpool, la? He goes on about Catholicism, protesting his atheism – ok, so why keep going on about it? Don't tell me: once a Catholic, always a Catholic, or some BS like that. Well, Steady Mike refreshingly told me that was false about a decade ago; but in any case, TD's relation to religion, or anything, is just NOT INTERESTING, no more worth putting on screen than anyone else's.

His payoffs, punchlines and would-be wit are painful. He actually enunciates ‘all the fun of the fair’ over a shot of a fairground; he talks of Suez as a last hurrah for Victorian Empire when much of the map was red (should that be pink?). These lines are meant to be redeemed by irony somehow - but they float nowhere, they make the author seem a wheezing windbag who hasn't coined a phrase of his own in decades. It all lacks any purchase, any incision on the material; it’s desperately flailing. The obvious formal comparison for me is Keiller -- but how much Keiller shows and talks about reality, how little he gets lost in his own uninteresting head, and how interested he is in the present day – as well as the history that has gone into it.

He plays 'He Ain't Heavy' at some length over shots of soldiers in the 1950s, cos his brother was a soldier. The main interest here for me is just to listen to the structure of that Hollies track, hear the circulation of the chords: I don't need Terence Davies to make me do this, Dale Winton could cue it more amiably. He plays 'The Folks Who Live On The Hill' over shots of tower blocks: what bludgeoning, ill-wielded sarcasm, getting us nowhere near a real analysis of what did and didn't work about such reconstruction. All this was at least a lot more briskly done in The Rock & Roll Years about 25 years ago. He even dares to sneer at the Beatles: yes, this unprolific artist whose current claims to artistry are entirely undermined by this lame film has the nerve to sniff at the greatest, most dazzlingly productive artistic talent Britain has produced since Virginia Woolf. 'Yeah yeah yeah' he gurns over some footage of them. No, no, no.

Maybe you should see some of his proper films before dismissing him as a self-satisfied bore?

See, THIS is the sort of criticism I want to read in Guardian Film & Music.

If he doesn't think this is a proper film, why is he releasing it in cinemas, and why is it being hailed as 'one of the cinematic events of the year'? If he doesn't rate it or think it represents his talent properly, then he could have suppressed it.

But yes, I'm sure his other films must, indeed, be better than this.

where has this film been "acclaimed" as "one of the cinematic events of the year", and by whom?

Just to save everyone else a lot of time and money:

Distant Voices, Still Lives - bullying, half-dead dad, tell me something I don't know. I knew Bill Douglas. Tel, you're no Bill Douglas.

The Long Day Closes - dead from the neck down David Thomson-friendly cack which invites us to think that sitting in front of a cinema screen watching films constitutes cinema (see also Cinema Paradiso).

The Neon Bible - a grave insult to John Kennedy O'Toole.

The House Of Mirth - a graver insult to Edith Wharton.

It has been acclaimed as 'undoubtedly one of the cinematic events of the year' by an anonymous writer of publicity materials for it.

Patrick Keillor's films aren't exactly high budget but there's more than enough imagination to make up for that.

Good comparison! London and Robinson in Space mange to be moving without descending into mawkishness, and manage (on a low budget, as you say) to make London look like an alien, deserted wasteland better than, for example, 28 Days Later ever did.

Nothing in Cannes has given me as much pleasure as Terence Davies' glorious Of Time and the City, showing out of competition as a "special screening". A personal meditation on the postwar Liverpool of his 1950s childhood, the film is a collage of newsreel footage, video and still images of the city past and present, edited together with exacting aesthetic judgement, transfigured by Davies's musical choices and accompanied by his own ringing narration. It is by turns tender, lyrical, angry, shrewd and, above all, funny. This tough, unsentimental film refuses to use cliches and it got enormous, deserved laughs from festival-goers of all nationalities.

Terence Davies' voice itself is a revelation, as mellifluous as an old-school Shakespearean, sharp as a whip, with fruity top notes of camp, a little like a more contemplative Uncle Monty or a highbrow Kenneth Williams (whose sly, queeny dialogue from Round the Horne is one of many madeleines which launch Davies back into the past). He boldly quotes familiar lines of verse, Housman and Eliot, and builds into them poetic reveries of his own. His aperçus and jokes are too numerous to quote here, but the tone turns on a sixpence from compassion, to gentleness, to rage. He is full of pure love for the working men and women who lived tough lives with hardly a complaint, and Liverpool's forgotten generation of servicemen who went off to fight in the Korean war - one of many profoundly moving sequences.

I was reminded of Philip Larkin's request that his poems should be read aloud as simply as if giving directions in the street: Davies' poetic cinema has precisely this clarity and force. If I had my way, he would get a special Coeur d'Or for this movie, which should be showing in Cannes' biggest cinema on a 24-hour loop.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/may/20/cannesfilmfestival.festivals1

Terence Davies' new film, his first for eight years, is a heartfelt and even ecstatic study of Liverpool, the home town of his 1950s boyhood. The movie is brashly emotional and sentimental - sometimes angry, more often hilarious. Nothing has given me more pleasure this year: the sweetness of its temper, the unfashionable seriousness of its design and its mixture of worldliness and innocence make for something sublime. It has something of Humphrey Jennings's Listen to Britain and something more of Noël Coward, the Coward of This Happy Breed or Brief Encounter. Like Coward, Davies revels in the potency of cheap music.

Of Time and the City Release: 2008 Country: UK Cert (UK): 12A Runtime: 72 mins Directors: Terence Davies More on this film Of Time and the City was made possible by a modest grant from a number of public bodies, including Liverpool's Digital Departures project. The result is miraculous. It has ended the director's unhappy professional drought, returned him to the wellspring of his early autobiographical inspiration, and done so in such a way as to create new perspectives on the unholy trinity of class, sexuality and Catholicism. The movie might even inaugurate a new "late" period for this director: one showing him making peace with himself and with his past, but still laying painfully bare the cost of this process.

The form is simple enough: a relatively short (at 72 minutes) docu-collage of video and film footage about the Liverpool of today and yesterday, accompanied by the director's own choices from the classics and the pre-pop Light Programme numbers that moved him as a child. Davies' voiceover narration is as rich and dark and fruity as Dundee cake laced with mescaline. You haven't heard anything like it since Richard Griffiths' Uncle Monty. Davies' voice - indeed, his whole movie - is a plangent, baritone aria. In younger, lighter form, this same off-camera voice is to be heard reciting the service for the burial of the dead in the Death and Transfiguration section of Davies' trilogy from the early 1980s.

Its effects are forthright and arguably unsubtle. Davies hits you with Housman and Eliot. His musical choices are familiar, and the images and newsreels he selects are not novel in any strict sense of archival discovery. But the juxtapositions deliver an intravenous jolt of rapture and sorrow, all at once. Davies is incensed by postwar Britain's caste system; he is fizzing with scorn and rage on behalf of Liverpool's resourceful, creative working class, imprisoned in brutal housing and patronised by the better-off. But he is also scornful and enraged at them - and at himself - for allowing this to happen for so long. Davies sees a long, rotten, miserable time in British history, as chokingly dull and sexless as an eternal Sunday afternoon, and he sees this period as starting well before the Chatterley ban and ending well after the Beatles' first LP, if indeed it has finished at all.

Which brings me to the film's cheekiest coup: Davies' cheerful denigration of the Beatles. In theory, Liverpool's greatest sons delivered exactly the death blow to pompous, class-bound Britain for which Davies was yearning. Yet their cultural earthquake arrived at precisely the moment when the young Davies fell poignantly in love with Bruckner, performed in genteel concert halls in which there was no opportunity for copping off with anyone. We see the Beatles in full swing, playing Hippy Hippy Shake - though Davies dubs over the superior version by the Swinging Blue Jeans, perhaps as a subtle slight, or perhaps because rights clearance for the Fab Four was too pricey. The kids duly get into the Beatles in the Cavern Club, but Davies removes the pop soundtrack and replaces it with an unhurried, swooning orchestral score from the 19th century. The zeitgeist-malfunction is bizarre and brilliantly wrong in the way real life always is.

All Davies fans know the scene from his trilogy in which a gloomy church interior is inspected while we listen to the agonised narrator on the phone, begging someone to tattoo his scrotum, a procedure for which he will need to be as "hard as a biscuit". Davies shows these same churches in 2008 as deconsecrated, transfigured into trendy wine bars, clubs and eateries. You can hear the relief in his voice and see it on the screen. Goodbye to all that guilt, thank God.

But there is something else there, too: bafflement and pain at the spectacle of a city he no longer recognises. Miseries have been swept away, but certainties also. When he surveys young people thronging the streets on a Friday night, with money to spend, they do not appear to have the "white working class" label as clearly as their forebears. What are their loyalties? What is their identity? If consumerism has abolished the shackle of class and, consequently, the aspirational escape route of education and culture, then what now are their challenges, their private pains? Davies appears to be asking himself if he can understand them at all, but even this admission of weakness as an artist is bold and even thrilling.

It could be that, like Philip Roth, or even like Proust, Davies will find his own youth is a rich seam that he has come nowhere near to exhausting - even that the act of creative exploration creates new, undreamed-of reserves of raw material. What a lovely film this is, and what a welcome comeback for one of Britain's greatest film-makers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/oct/31/of-time-and-the-city

I am certainly not inventing the acclaim.

'a rapturous film'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/video/2008/oct/31/of-time-and-the-city

Davies’ narrating voice (carrying no trace of Liverpool

I have no grounds to take issue with anything else you've written specifically about this film, cos I haven't seen it, but this doesn't ring true. There's certainly a Scouse twang to Davies' speech. I hear no trace of Scouse with, say, Tom Baker or Simon Rattle, but TD definitely has it.

Maybe the Council should have given the gig to Tarbuck.

Distant Voices Still Lives is one of my favourite films. I would kill for a decent copy.

― admrl, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
British cinema is so frustrating because I'm sure that we could have more films like this if someone sorted out all the funding issues.

― admrl, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 Bookmark

Caught a screening of DVSL recently and yeah magical experience and all that but has it really been a case of 'funding'? I mean DVSL doesn't look at all expensive in the first place. No concrete ideas but it strikes me as a lot more than just a simple funding thing.

Incredibly 'singular' tho': I suppose it captures that very way in which voices, lives and songs intermingled in a er just-before-mass-record-consumption era, using music like almost nothing else.

On the British film classics tip has anyone got a copy of the DVD issue of 'Radio On'? The BFI put a really good effort on the booklet, for a change.

I liked Terence on Newsnight Review a few weeks ago. Something different, to say the least.

Radio On is an incredibly bad film. The best thing in it is a cameo from Sting. It says something about cinema that this is readily considered a classic. But what exactly it says, we'll have to return to later, as in the meantime Tranmere have to defend this corner.

You're wrong about Radio On.

Y-y-you - you mean that - that someone ... ELSE is - is even b-b-BETTER than STING ???

Put it this way. Chris Petit's Weston-super-Mare is better than Jeffrey Archer's.

Written with characteristic obliquity, but better:

Remember the Somme, with 37m poppies, and Kristallnacht. Remember tear gas in Selma, 1965, and tears of joy in Grant Park, 2008. Remember white faces as banks went belly-up. This suddenly seems remembrance year, a year full of "journeys" - and the moment, with the film-maker Terence Davies, to ask what memory means.

The eloquent Davies returns with Of Time and the City - part documentary, part autobiography. The city is Liverpool in the decades after the war. The time is boyhood and adolescence, grappling with homosexuality and a parallel rejection of Catholicism. And now, Davies seems to say, that world is gone. The streets are razed. The kids carouse, fornicate, feel no pain. He is an "alien" in the place where he was born.

It's five-star filming. But, almost accidentally, it touches something deeper: an exploration of how we see our past in compartments, little boxes of memory, through a haze of forgetfulness. For I, too, was in Liverpool for three of Davies' remembered years - and he doesn't quite remember.

Grim-faced lads marching off to fight in Korea? But that war was 1950-53, and Davies (who turns 63 today) was only five at the time. He doesn't really remember. Liverpool's overhead railway? Closed, 1956. The new Metropolitan Cathedral, opened 1967 - seven years after he knew he was gay. A huge BA poster fills the screen, signalling escape? But BA didn't exist until 1974.

Maybe detail, oscillating across a canvas of 20 years, is the enemy of artistic truth. Maybe Liverpool - a seasoned spinner of self-serving legend itself - habitually brushes aside precision. Maybe it was so long ago anyway that dates and scenes are lost without trace in the maw of individual memory. But, sealed, compartmentalised, this ride along the Mersey seems to feed on itself.

But hang on: it wasn't so long ago. It feels distant, because the archive footage used here has a fuzz to it. This past didn't exist of necessity in some cotton-wool country. Its ageing process is more artful than that, designed to let in a certain bleak nostalgia.

Yet the Liverpool of the 1960s was more than the Beatles (who Davies doesn't much like). It was Harold Wilson from Huyton, Shankland's plan for a modern city, Ken Dodd at the Empire, John Pritchard's Philharmonic, Bernard Hepton's Playhouse. The first flat I rented was flattened like the rest of Bedford Street North as the university grew. Goodbye to rats. But hello to something dynamic, hopeful - something absolutely all of a part with Merseyside 2008. And, in the mind's eye, it remains vivid, absolutely without fuzz.

Time isn't buried under tower blocks. It lives on with people, and with the things that bracket their existence: Steven Gerrard, Chinatown, Christianity, a fierce sense of culture. The world of long ago is today and tomorrow's world as well. The biggest drop in house prices since 1992? The lousiest recession since records began? It is often thought we have no grip on memory any longer, as though we don't remember - and cannot learn - so that our lives are trapped in a curious, panicky present.

Rubbish. Memory is a continuum, not a succession of time capsules bolted shut. Today's "journeys" tell a simple truth. 1961: the Beatles first play the Cavern; the 44th president of the United States is born. The futility of the Somme lives and dies again when Saddam's Iraq fights Iran through more bloody years of trench carnage. Compare and contrast Lumumba's Congo of 1960 and today: then weep. And when I walked through Berlin's Holocaust memorial the other day, schoolkids were playing touch round its field of 2,711 concrete slabs. Don't forget to remember, but remember to move on. Memory is a challenge, not a trap: and real journeys never end.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/10/terence-davies-memory-film

What pretentious tosh.

Also: "whom Davies doesn't much like," not "who." One expects better from an ex-Guardian editor and hence a Properly Trained Journalist.

Sure, that's an error. But the piece as a whole, if I understand it at all, seems to me wiser than the film.

Your go to guy on all questions of memory:

http://daily.greencine.com/monaco-resnais.jpg

They're showing the Liverpool film at MoMA tonight at 8:15, but his Trilogy first at 6, so I'll probably see that alone as I ned to eat...

http://moma.org/exhibitions/film_exhibitions.php?id=11551

(I've never seen the trilogy)

it's v depressing. i'm not sure i like it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/3562734/Of-Time-And-The-City-by-Terence-Davies---review.html

^^ hardstyle takedown of 'OTATC'

has anyone read this?
http://media.us.macmillan.com/jackets/500H/9781844571390.jpg

I wasn't much impressed by OTATC, but I was by his sonorous, guttural voice.

That book seems like it should be the best thing ever, if you revere Farley and Davies as I do, but it's a bit disappointing.

^^that's what I feared : /

pretty psyched for this:

http://www.empireonline.com/news/feed.asp?NID=29778

So am I!

Saw The Deep Blue Sea and really won't say much (before the review in late March) other than I quite like it, and that either Tom Hiddleston or his body double has a real nice ass.

Has Terence Rattigan been totally rehabbed in the UK for his centennial? I only know a few of the film adaps, like The Browning Version and Separate Tables, but he was scorned as utterly fusty 20 years ago, no?

The House of Mirth is still my favorite "costume drama" of the last twenty years.

Yeah in the UK he has been out of fashion after 'the angry young men' came along. I would suggest that - given what I saw of Deep Blue Sea - a 'hidden' reason for that could be he happened to write great, involving parts for women. But its all pure speculation on my part.

Not sure about 'rehabbed': give it time. Love to see the play tho'.

I liked it a lot, the tough opening was well made. Didn't think the flashing forwards and back added much. Read an absoluetly hilarious review saying that My Week w/Marilyn was the better flick from the 50s (released in the same wk over here) bcz its vision of celebrity infested Britain that it portrays is something that we live more with today. Not seen in, but besides the inaccuracies in that assertion (the obsession with stars and celebrity surely did not start in the 50s) it sounded hilarious: Deep Blue Sea is a classic story of a person going from order to chaos, taking chances (which often don't go well). These are all questions we are all likely to find more relevant.

I also watched The Long Dy Closes, which I loved even more. Seems like a total musical in the manner of Demy, rather than Cinema Paradiso (as I think Marcello said on ILX)

watching that Mark Cousins show The History Of Film i was thinking 'i bet he doesn't mention Terence Davies' but then he did, and raved about him and interviewed him too.

I've watched this film at last. Beautifully made, shot, designed. Gillian Anderson seems to perform tremendously. But I couldn't really understand on what basis her character was 'ruined'. Maybe this social scene is beyond my ken.

great movie is this. All the characters in it have few redeeming features but still the path to ruin is a universal theme and I always get a bit teary at the end.

one of my favs

If you feel that way, Calzino, you should read Wharton's book. It may be my favourite novel and have read it 5 times at least. The End of the film is not quite the end of the film or, at least, you're not quite as sure as you are in the film, what actually happened.

Actually, an ex of mine bought me a beautiful old copy of the book as a "sorry I broke up with you" present because he knew how much the book meant to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

weird that it came up on two different threads though, Plax mentioned it on another thread.

I've never read any Wharton nor felt inclined to, but now I feel like I should try some!

I reread The Custom of the Country 10 days ago to remind myself of how merciless she can be. Please read her.

Wharton is absolutely amazing. Please do.

xpost yes, Alfred. It's merciless and humane at the same time. There's nothing like it. I don't think even James made a character as ruthless as Lily Bart that you care about and root for.

That Davis carried that off in his adaptation is a big achievement

I love the neon Bible but I think everyone hates that movie

I've never seen it but everyone hates it, yes. I've hated Davis films that were well received but Distant Voices, Still Lives is all-time great, top 5, at times top 1, for me. I had to stop watching the Dickinson film because I was embarrassed for him, that he put that put there, so I'm all over the place with him.

Yeah distant voices is amazing. I basically had a nervous breakdown the first time I saw it