In the absence of an analysis of class relations, British cinema might as well not exist. From Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) to the recent Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham, 2018), passing through Mike Leigh’s filmography, the idea of social stratification constitutes the red thread which connects this particular national cinema, perpetually preoccupied with understanding who we are and from where we are speaking. But nobody inscribed the ineffable and ineluctable feeling of belonging to a certain class – in particular, to the working class – with more graciousness than Terence Davies. What separates Davies’ early films – Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) – from anything else is not just their capacity to invent a method, a style, but an entire affective territory which surpasses them, encasing them into a whirlpool of the heart. The Long Day Closes is, in this sense, a film that advances slowly, setting the truth of feeling as its sole guiding star: from one and to the other, Davies – this Proustian spirit of working-class England – labors solely towards testing a handful of creative hypotheses through which the cinematic machine, with its machinery and rails and ancestral virility, approaches the silky folds of the soul. It’s a telling sign that, in cinema, emotion is a hybrid being with the head of a man and a body made out of metal and polished glass, which sometimes just so happens to hide its own traces and thus reveal to us the purest landscape of existence.

A difficult mission, which Davies surmounts with a precise approach of epiphany which – dare I say – bestows upon him the title of contemporary cinema’s greatest stylist (despite some recent declines). I know of no other film that is more courageous in launching out to create an artificial construct of a mnemonic bubble, raising retrospection at the rank of divine enterprise, capable of sublimating everything that it meets in its path. For that matter, it’s worth noting how every little gesture in this film composed from mute, heavy stares gains a sort of sainthood under Davies’ instructions, as if his lens would be capable of creating an aura for any prosaic event that passes in front of it. We are in the middle of the fifties, and we are following Bud (Leigh McCormack), a sad kid about 10 years of age, who spends his days reluctantly going to school and then taking the very first chance to vanish „at the pictures”. Yet, its obstinate refusal to adhere to naturalism makes the film birth an enchanted space, rendered alive by the camera to the same degree to which it is inhabited by its actors, both fantastical – the rain comes down from a sprinkler, the buildings are pure set design – and simultaneously more real than the streets of the big city: the projector’s dreamy lights, the wallpapers wrapping the house, the hours dedicated to catechism – all of these turn into a portal which leads to the infinite possibilities of memory. In this intimate space, through which we wander aimlessly (or not), as if we would watch the film and its laid-back making-of at the same time, Davis unspools the complicated thread of autobiography, leaving behind for us a trail of hints regarding homosexuality, loneliness, the love of cinema: the things that turned him into who he is.

Regarding the beauty of this film – a beauty belonging to the discourse of anyone who is in love – one could write volumes. About that New Year’s Eve, which passes us through the little class ritual of collective celebration, only to end on the sweet melancholy of the family unit, the one which closes the door and says “good night!” to itself for the first time in the new year. Or about this mother, already past her youth, who works around the house while subtly humming, as the soft light cloaks her as if in a painting by Vermeer. And how could one not be sensitive towards the sociological portrait that takes shape, stroke after stroke, through the gradual accumulation of these small vignettes where Davies excels, revealing an entire class with its small little pleasures (pub nights), illusory refuges (the family that is slowly getting bigger, as the girls and boys find partners belonging to the same social milieu), unforgivable blind spots (the splendid, telling scene in which a man of color gets the wrong address and is met with the frightened fury of Bud’s family)? Looking back with tenderness, Davies intertwines the score of this coming of age (spiritually, sexually, professionally) with the reminiscences of certain human relations – solidarity and implied group affiliation – which tend to quickly disappear. His weave is not aiming at factual preciseness, but at a vague impression, which huddles in all of the details which are impossible to falsify, that life was lived after all – and the film’s fore lies in extracting, from all this voluptuousness of a harsh life lived in common, a sort of hidden, cupcake-flavored joy.

There are some formalist directors who aspire to push the aesthetics of a film towards a plane of existence that is relatively autonomous from its contents, but oftentimes, their projects melt into a mannerist swamp where everything becomes unclear, except for their afflicted efforts. And then there is Terence Davies, who, in the name of form, mobilizes phenomenal quantities of autobiographical matter, left to distill for just the right amount of time, until he obtains this concentrate of incandescent life that is film. The Long Day Closes must be seen in order to understand the dilemma that haunts a reviewer to the very end, when it feels like having witnessed a cavalcade that is a narrative invasion – an invasion of mostly blown-up adventures –, but, in fact, all that they have seen were changes in light, rain drops, slow pans along an empty set. Davies’ goldsmith-like concision – a prolonged stasis, to paraphrase Jonathan Rosenbaum, in which oftentimes the only thing needed is the chords of an oldie tune for everything to come alight – is the polar opposite of the wasteful insanity that has gripped cinema in the past few years. Each of his scenes are akin to the pearls of oysters: they contain the reflections of the universe within, and whoever is lucky enough to have seen them feels that they have been plucked from within being itself, and carried back to us with the utmost of care. The Long Day Closes is a refined necklace in which manner explodes any barriers and passes beyond, onto the free realm of the greatest creations. 

A restored version of The Long Day Closes has recently been screened at the Viennale.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.