The Long Day Closes (1992, Terence Davies) (Patreon)

71/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. I avoided it for two years (U.S. theatrical run was mid-'93) because I'd hated Distant Voices, Still Lives; my recent reappraisal of that film provides valuable context for what follows. Précis: I wasn't yet ready in 1989 for Davies' non-narrative approach, and also probably didn't quite recognize that it was non-narrative, because Postlethwaite's tyrannical dad generates so much apparent nightmarish drama, and because "Still Lives" shifts into a chronological tour of personal upheaval. Here, there's no dad, no major life events, and no mistaking the film's experimental nature. So when I finally, grudgingly caught up with Long Day (on VHS, I'm sorry to say; may never see a print), it fairly walloped me with the pure-cinema force of Davies' memories, now quite clearly divorced from any conventional storytelling mode. Significantly, what stuck fast in my own memory—so much so that it remained my primary mental image, over 25 years later—wasn't a character or an incident, but varying gradients of sunlight on a stretch of carpeting, shifting with the movement of unseen clouds. That's now been supplanted by the dark-sky, title-track finale, but substituting one abstraction for another, grander abstraction changes very little. Point is, I got it back then. Everything clicked. And I came to suspect that I'd badly misunderstood Distant Voices, Still Lives, which did in fact turn out to be the case when I revisited it last year.

Here's the ironic part: I now love "Distant Voices" (meaning specifically the film's first half, originally separate from "Still Lives") so much that it slightly diminishes my appreciation for this film, which no longer overpowers me to the degree that it did when it seemed revelatory. Davies has since made only literary adaptations (plus a documentary and a biopic), presumably because he'd exhausted his own childhood; there's plenty here that's memorable and captivating, but to some extent we're still getting the leftovers—memories that didn't find their way into the previous film, for whatever reason. What's more, after believing for years that I much preferred Long Day specifically because it's not dominated by an irrationally furious patriarch, I now think that it suffers comparatively from his absence. (D'oh!) We get alternate instances of random hardship, e.g. the teacher who pre-emptively whacks his students' hands on day one just to "show them who's boss," but that doesn't have the same galvanizing impact as a threat at home that can arise seemingly from nowhere at any moment. Without those terrifying explosions, Davies' vision arguably gets overly misty-eyed...a tendency that he attempts to counteract (or so I assume) via that odd, unexplained moment toward the end in which the house partially collapses, accompanied by Welles' comeuppance narration from Ambersons and then a bitter Miss Havisham speech from Lean's version of Great Expectations. Doesn't quite achieve the intended cathartic effect for me, but it's immediately followed by that magnificent final sequence, which sends you out on a haunted, awestruck high. 

Anyway, still a superb movie, even if it's had some of its thunder stolen by its predecessor (a plot twist I'd never have foreseen). DV, SL's group sing-alongs mostly get replaced by superlative contrapuntal needle drops, e.g. Debbie Reynolds' "Tammy" flooding the soundtrack as Bud, Davies' 11-year-old alter ego, swings over a staircase from a crossbeam while the camera tracks right to left overhead and we dissolve to overhead shots of a cinema audience and then parishioners kneeling in prayer. And the specificity with which Davies recreates his childhood was truly brought home for me when Bud remarks to his friend that shining a torch into the sky sends its light out to infinity and beyond (more or less). Made me think of doing the same thing when I went camping as a boy, and that in turn suddenly made me remember the flashlights my family took on those camping trips. They weren't the common cylindrical type, but big, square orange boxes, roughly the shape of a loaf of bread cut in half. Sorta like this, except they were made in the '70s (if not earlier) and looked a whole lot less sleek. If I were to make a movie about my own childhood, featuring a camping scene, I can easily imagine myself becoming obsessed with finding that exact make and model, even though one could credibly argue that any old period flashlight would do. Sure, if the goal were merely to tell a story. But not if you're trying to engineer the sole form of time travel (to the past, at least) that's consistent with our current understanding of physics.