Terence Davies trilogy –of angels and gimps children madonna and child death and transfiguration

Dir. Terence Davies / 1976/80/83

There are many who believe Terence Davies to be the greatest living English film-maker, his craftsmanship and poetic sensibility without equal. The Trilogy is not so much a catalogue of hardships but a stirring account of human dignity triumphing over emotional and spiritual confusion.

 To encounter such work is always an unsettling, if exhilarating, experience: it tends to polarise opinion between those who are profoundly moved and those who hate every minute of the experience. The work of Terence Davies, quipped one critic, makes Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis.

Davies was born in 1945 in Liverpool. His was a deeply unhappy childhood; his family was poor, his father abusive and violent. He was educated in the pernicious traditions of Roman Catholicism and in his youth struggled to come to terms with his sexual feelings at a time when homosexuality was an offence against God, the family, society and the law. All but two of the films Davies has made are set in the Liverpool of his youth, working through the themes which shaped his progress into adulthood. He is greatly influenced by T S Eliot’s “Four Quartets” – a meditation on time and memory – and in the medium of film Davies has found a way to evoke his own memories of the past and his fears for the future.

Earlier this year the BFI released The Terence Davies Trilogy – three short films with which Davies began his directing career. The films were shot some years apart, in 1976, 1980 and 1983 and as Davies progressed from one to the other he grew more skilful in his directing, more ambitious in his compositions and had slightly higher budgets with which to work.

He recalls his amazement when he was given the £3,000 it cost to place a recording of Doris Day singing “It all depends on you” over the opening sequence of the third film in the trilogy; the first two films have barely any soundtrack at all. And it is by that third film, “Death and Transfiguration”, that the fully fledged filmmaker is born who would go on to make the two feature length masterpieces that followed: Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. For unlike others mining the experiences of their hard-bitten youths and with wider polemics in mind, like Ken Loach, Davies works best when he is free to juxtapose contrasting images and to counterpoise these images with music. His films are not descriptions of a life, nor do they rail against its injustices. They are meditations on childhood, middle age and death.

The trilogy follows Davies’ alter-ego, Robert Tucker. The first film, Children, finds Robert tossed between the casual violence of a grim small-minded school and the traumas of a loveless home ruled over by an ill and violent-tempered father. The pre-pubescent inklings of his sexuality in the showers of his local swimming baths give way to his older Robert, aged 23, receiving a repeat transcription for depression from his GP, who then asks him “still no interest in girls, son?” The closing section of the film spends rather too long dwelling upon the death of his father although this does draw out a remarkably nuanced performance from the young Robert (Phillip Maudsley), at once pleased and distraught at the old man’s passing.

The middle film of the trilogy, Madonna and Child opens with beautiful images of the river Mersey at dawn as the ferry transports Robert to his office job (Davies left school at sixteen and spent ten years as a shipping clerk and accountant before going to Drama School).

Now Robert cares for his aging mother while snatching vicarious pleasure in the company of male prostitutes. The most startling and amusing scene has the camera pan the interior of a Catholic cathedral with an ethereal choir singing as, on the soundtrack, we hear Robert on the phone asking a tattooist to tattoo his bollocks: we are given a professional’s insight into the many pitfalls of such an undertaking before the tattooist, disarmed by Robert’s continued insistence on going through with it, cries shy of the job and hangs up; and all the while the camera lingers on a beneficent Virgin Mary.

The last of the trilogy, Death and Transfiguration, is the most expressionistic of the set, focused on the twin poles of Robert’s life, as a little boy playing an angel in the school nativity play (“Do you love God, child?” asks his Mother Superior) and on the death throes of the elderly Robert (beautifully acted by Wilfred Brambell in his last ever role), still surrounded by clucking nuns – Catholicism seeping into every nook and cranny of Robert’s long bitter life. It is a recording of Davies’ own mother singing as Robert stretches out his arms and the bright light is extinguished – the death of Robert and of God.

This harrowing and very beautiful trio of films ought to have set Davies upon a long and glorious career but it has never quite materialised. Partly this reflects the myopia of an industry that obliges directors to accommodate the vagaries of a commercial industry but it would be a mistake to blame it all on that.

Films as personal as the work of Davies have never been abundantly financed, here or elsewhere. Davies won’t conform to the norms of film narrative. He sees, he says, no reason why there should be a climax on page six of the screenplay and insists that the only thing more embarrassing than an actor with a gun is a British actor with a gun –
I imagine the pitches he makes to hapless producers would be well worth filming by themselves.

Maybe of even more lasting significance – who knows – is that all these beautiful autobiographical explorations have not, it seems, proved all that cathartic. Being gay, says Davies, has ruined his life – he is celibate by choice and lives to work.

Having not got a film made in eight years, Davies was finally commissioned to direct Of Time and the City as part of the celebration of Liverpool as European City of Culture. Given how ambivalent Davies’ depiction of his home town has been there is perhaps an irony in choosing him to represent the place once more on film. Still, the city has produced no finer filmmaker and by all accounts, Of Time and the City is a richly beautiful and rewarding piece from this poetic of British directors (and with a generously funded soundtrack to boot.)

The film will be on general release in November, with a couple of earlier showings in October as part of the London Film Festival.

Tue 02, December 2008 @ 17:56