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

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

Neon Bible shares aspects of it s staginess and the very mannered idealised refraction through a child's memories. It's sort of too weird to 'fail' imo whereas the later stuff looks atrocious. I feel like mirth is the only time he managed to do a ,'straight' film well. Gillian Anderson is excellent in it, I like her in theory but this is the only thing I've seen her in that I thought she was amazing in, she gets the messiness of the character over so well

Yes.

xps

I thought the Dickinson film was brilliant as well tbh. But I recall you not liking Sunset Song either, Jed - which also I liked! I think I might have to overcome my hatred of Tom Hiddlestone and get round to watching Deep Blue Sea soonish.

yeah Gillian Anderson is burning bright in HoM. Amazing performance.

amazing direction from TD as well. Her transition from arch-socialite playing the game to realising the game is finished is done without any mawkish nonsense. Which makes it all the more powerful.

I did but I don't really want to get into it :)

GA has been brilliant, at times, and is VERY good in this. I think she's a bit too pleased with herself now and that gets in the way. Helen Mirren is the same, like she can't get over herself.

xpost

There wasn't anything wrong with Dan Ackroyd's performance, it just seemed to me that he was trying very hard to Be Serious and it came across as stilted.
Otherwise this was great, although with a little less mirth than advertised.

laura linney is also quite a force in this

i had a crush on eric stolz in this film lol

i recall a particularly beautiful scene where we see a garden pond being rained on for a solid minute or so? i should really watch this again soon but i'm afraid i don't have the heart for this kind of story anymore, i'm too fragile now lol.

Yes, it blends very slowly into a shot of the house with the furniture covered with dust-sheets.

The fade-in showing the bow of the ship from which Lily's eventually banished is just....

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

Heh, sorry meant to put on the POLL thread