Don't look back: Of Time and the City

Writer, director and one-time actor Terrence Davies in only his mid-60s, yet his voice, while sonorous and formidable, coheres disembodied to the flow of images in Of Time and the City with the withering crust and wearied basement furnace grumble of someone inching up on 100 at least. His is the voice of one whose disenchantment with the world has long turned toxic, who seems to have come to terms the delusional nature of nostalgia sometime shortly following his birth.

Nevertheless, Davies looks long and hard into the past in this, his first documentary and his first film of any sort since his woefully underappreciated Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth (2000), which gave Gillian Anderson her finest role. The subject of this new film is Liverpool, Davies’ hometown. It was commissioned by the city following its designation as a European Cultural Capital in 1998. If those in charge were actually expecting something warm and inviting they must have been pretty pissed when Davies’ treatment was finally delivered. But then they must not have seen any of his previous films set in Liverpool, such as The Long Day Closes (92), Distant Voices, Still Lives (88) and the trilogy composed of ‘Children’ (76), ‘Madonna and Child’ (80) and ‘Death and Transfiguration’ (83), none of which are likely to win the hearts of the local tourist board. The fondest memories shared here seem most closely linked to going to the movies, Davies’ hearty interest in professional wrestlers—one of the film’s absolute highlights—and going on holidays. Davies’ contempt for the postwar Liverpool of his youth is only matched by his utter dismay at the Liverpool of the present.

There is, to be sure, something quite seductive, at least for a while, in Davies’ carefully rendered recollections, a sense of longing that lingers even when caked in disappointment and conveyed through numerous bitter witticisms, one of which is a clever dis to the Beatles that’s sure to get a crackling response from just about any audience. His departure from the Catholic Church and general shedding of faith, his budding homosexuality and gradual gleaning of its forbidding precariousness, his working-class upbringing and the dire limitations it wrought: as he speaks about these themes there come certain emotionally pointed synchronicities between his words and the imagery, much of it archival footage, some of it quite fascinating. Even here there is ample evidence of Davies' particular gifts. He's among the world's best filmmakers who seem unable to make very many films. But this film’s attitude is essentially static, its approach not all that driven by actual questions or curiosity, and Davies’ voice seems almost designed to lull you to sleep while its message diligently grinds you down.

I have to admire the way Davies arranges his selection of images from the past, which thread along with a lyricism perhaps informed by English poetry, something Davies clearly adores unreservedly. Yet the dominant utility of all the new footage he’s cultivated seems to be one of fodder for comments of sarcasm and condescension toward Liverpool’s architecture, civic pride, culture and appallingly dressed people. The pomposity, bile and curmudgeonly defiance do not in themselves spoil the value of the film; the problem rather has to do with the limits of what this inclination can possibly yield after 72 minutes.