Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (dir. Terence Davies) is a musical, of sorts - a very peculiar one - that takes place in Liverpool during the forties and the fifties and it is also one of the most moving films I've seen in a while. Before you click yourself away from here (a musical!), let me tell you this is not the run-of-the-mill chirpy romance in which music provides a sense of comfort and escapism. Distant Voices, Still Lives has collected the saddest music in the world - this is music of nostalgia and commemoration. Or no, this is a film in which even the most cheerful little melody is transformed into a hymn about memories and losses.

When you think about family tale you think about epic narratives with many characters and where one generation's fate is contrasted with another generation's. Davies' approach is different. He skips the grand scope and opts for something altogether more impressionistic and fractured. The material of the movie is taken from the director's own life. In the first section, the theme is fear. There is the fear that a violent partiarch evokes and there is the war-time fear. The second part mostly takes place in pubs. Family members gather and sing, thinking about their pasts, but also doubting their future lives.

Colors are mostly toned down to hushed sepias, and I must say this does not strike me as a cheap effect. The fluid camera-work is structured around space so that time also is fluid, we see a hallway, the camera moves, and suddenly we are thrown ten years ahead. Films about memories abound. Actually showing how we remember things - in the sense where memory sometimes blurs with imagination - is a much rarer achievement, and Davies' film operates so well because it is not pretentious; instead of being engrossed in knotty mental paradoxes and warps, the film reminds us of how memories are also emotions.

The film centers on activities that are rarely expressive in the normal sense (where a character's typical behavior is revealed or established in a couple of quick scenes). Instead, Davies lets us see the daily activities of the family members. A woman washes a window, a group gathers on a porch and a small celebration takes place in a pub. There are weddings and funerals, life goes on. But Davies also shows how the ordinary is broken up and torn apart: like few other movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives conjures up a sense of terror and violence that have a horrendous explosive force. (Some of the scenes have a nightmarish quality and in some of them, inexplicable uncanniness is intermingled with something perfectly ordinary - look at that scene with "uncle Ted"!)

Every frame of this film felt real - I mean, it's quite surprising that it does, given how fond the director is of family portrait-styled images. Not in the sense of factual correspondence, but in the sense that this is a work of engagement; the characters are not treated with contempt or with a shallow need of generalization.The film shows lives coming together and drifting apart, and through all this, there is the music, the singing - I've never experienced singing that is at the same time so mundane and so heartbreaking. There is no hint of contrived cynicism in how the music shapes the film. Distant Voices, Still Lives contains an affection for life itself that never falters.

I'vegotonewordtosaytoyou, or three: WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!