THE LONG DAY CLOSES is a film by British director Terence Davies, one of the most underrated and misunderstood artists in film, even by critics and cognoscenti. It is a film with no real plot, and only perfunctory dialogue, as is the case with most of Davies' films. (The one exception being his brilliant adaptation of THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, which could not exist without more-than-perfunctory dialogue.) The more you watch, the more you learn that dialogue is unnecessary in guiding the viewer through the emotions and everyday minutiae of living that comprise their body.
The experience of a Terence Davies film is like walking through an enormous vault, where every volume on the endless shelves opens onto a vivid picture of a moment from the past of someone else’s life. It is his memory bank, and he traverses the highways of thought that connects these volumes, depending on the network of emotions that brings him back to open one. Davies’ images and sounds flow in and out of time constantly, and innovatively, as rainfalls begin in one memory and end in another, or when daydreaming in school brings us visually into his childhood doppelganger’s mind, which is off on the opulent balcony of a movie theater, or envisioning a misty sea tossing a sailboat about and adrift.
THE LONG DAY CLOSES is the completion of a trilogy that began with DISTANT VOICES, followed by STILL LIVES, which were released together as one film. DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES hit theaters in the late eighties and featured a darker slice of his life: his early childhood under the thumb of his gruesomely abusive monster of a father, and a time when music was often the only joyful presence in his life. (Davies’ creative output is often limited by difficulties in gathering financing for his highly idiosyncratic visions, and this trilogy took several difficult years to come to fruition.) THE LONG DAY CLOSES came 5 years later and chronicles the period of Davies’ adolescence when the brutish father has passed on, a passion for movies took over and his homosexuality, (with its expected complication of his Catholic upbringing), started to dawn on him.
Davies illuminates how each of the foremost social institutions, school, church, home, and theatre, shaped and changed his life. At the same time he spins a tale about the redemptive qualities of escaping into the land of the movies, resulting in a powerfully rendered patchwork quilt of the mind that has to be viewed repeatedly, and from many different angles, to fully comprehend it's complexities. Every scene is arranged like the firing sparks of synapses in a sort of temporal free-fall, cascading from memory to memory, but woven together sonically and visually, by pop music of the day, clips of dialogue from other films, dreamy dissolves and languorous camera movement, with the present. A "Proustian musical" as one critic so adeptly put it, this film, more than any other, illustrates the power of the past as a living breathing entity in our lives that can be recalled to the surface in an instant by a song, a smell, or a picture. The introductory scene is a perfect example of the pattern throughout: a fluid, cohesive arrangement of sound-bytes, song, and imagery to corporealize the emotional connections between past and present. The film opens with the blaring horns of the 20th Century Fox theme, (the fact that this is not a 20th Cent. Fox film should tell you something right away), as we gaze upon a tattered poster for THE ROBE, (a film that has particular significance as the first CinemaScope feature ever released), hanging on a brick wall in the rain. Then "Stardust" by Nat King Cole begins to play, as the camera prowls the rain-soaked, rubble-strewn street, and settles on a broken down row house, a pale shadow of what it once was. As the music peters out on the lyric "the music of the years gone by", a beautiful lap-dissolve takes us back to the house as it exists in Davies' memory, with his alter-ego, our protagonist "Bud", sitting on the steps counting his change and asking his mother for money to go the movies.
Often his song choices, as well as the films whose dialogue he chooses to sample, do not evenly match the timeframe of the scenes they are attached to, and their semiotic meanings may seem arbitrary at first. But only if you choose to interpret the film as a perfectly remembered series of memories. Davies is not interested in the kind of vapidly literal association of song lyrics to imagery. Even though THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and MEET ME IN ST LOUIS may have come out before "Bud" was born, as an admittedly autobiographical film the words "Back then, they had time for everything" spoken by Orson Welles, or Judy Garland tenderly crooning "Over the Bannister", carry an emotional impact that relates to the moment he is recreating visually. Davies understands that the mind does not compartmentalize its stock in perfect chronology but in a more mysteriously intuitive way. He braids all these different strands of memory and emotional triggers together in his filmmaking the way our minds naturally intertwine them. We needn't make literal sense of these curiously contrapuntal constructions. They make emotional sense to him.
His realization of the 1950's setting is so remarkable you would swear that you weren't watching a film, but someone's exquisitely shot home movies. At times, Bud will simply observe the waxing and waning of light from the fireplace, or the sun, and Davies is content to relax and marvel with him at this small miracle before it inspires another memory. Because of this deliberate style, we never doubt the authenticity of Davies' vision of the past, even when action is choreographed in time to the music. Characters suddenly burst into song, privately and in party settings, to express their emotions, but not in the traditional "musical number" fashion. They sing the way you or I would sing something to ourselves in times of sadness, to others in a happier and more crowded setting. It is music that bridges the temporal spaces the camera moves through as if merely wandering into the next room. The surrealism of the film's structure reinforces the realism of these people and their lives so that they always ring true in a way that no other filmmaker is capable. In the film's most stunning set-piece, Debbie Reynolds' rendition of "Tammy" is played over a series of identically angled, interlocking, overhead tracking shots; starting from Bud swinging on a metal bar outside his house, this microcosmic journey then brings us to the movie theatre, (where the people are seen through their curling streams of cigarette smoke caught in the projector's beam of light that divides the screen in half), people praying in a Catholic church, to students sitting in a classroom, and then back to Bud's home, all fizzling out with the end of the music. Again, lap-dissolves, music, and dialogue from other films are used to link different places and times together in one scene in order to underscore their interconnectedness within our minds, and the overlapping of their influences on us as maturing individuals. This scene in particular encapsulates the film's purpose succinctly: these are the things that make Terence Davies who he is, and they are the things that make each individual person who they are. We may respond to and remember them differently, then dimly, but they never truly vanish. They return unexpectedly to color our perceptions of the world around us. Home becomes theatre becomes church becomes school becomes home.
Davies ends this story with a glorious visual coda. The last shot is 3 minutes of clouds drifting over a full moon as the title song plays out, timed perfectly so that the moon's glow is gradually snuffed out by it's engulfment in the clouds; the music decrescendos and comes to an end as the last glimmer of light is extinguished: a remembered moment in time, fossilized in the mind and transmitted to celluloid for all to see...
Here are the lyrics of the song that plays over that image. It is a part-song written by Gilbert, (as in Gilbert and Sullivan), one whose most common use was for funerals. It is an appropriate end to the trilogy. Davies must have found it just as difficult to pull away from the drifting clouds as the stranglehold of his demons. It was with this film that he artistically laid to rest his troubled past. He has not visited it so directly since. It is a great testament to his art that the catharsis this piece of filmmaking seems to give him, is given to his audience just as deeply.
No star is o'er the lake,
Its pale watch keeping,
The moon is half awake,
Through gray mists creeping,
The last red leaves fall round
The porch of roses,
The clock hath ceased to sound,
The long day closes.
Sit by the silent hearth
In calm endeavour,
To count the sounds of mirth,
Now dumb for ever.
Heed not how hope believes
And fate disposes:
Shadow is round the eaves,
The long day closes.
The lighted windows dim
Are fading slowly.
The fire that was so trim
Now quivers lowly.
Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes.
