Filmmakers reflecting on their own childhood and early days of falling in love with cinema has been one of the more unexpected trends of the last handful of years. This spiritual subgenre includes the likes ofRoma,Belfast,The Fabelmans, andArmageddon Time, and seems to have sprouted from our modern inclination to reflect on ourselves and our past in a social media climate. Additionally, the pandemic and early days of quarantine confined us—ultimately forcing everyone to ruminate deeply about their existence.These coming-of-age storieswhose main thesis is to celebrate the magic of movies can be hokey, and we’re trained to groan when we hear that another filmmaker wants to open up about their youth. All these films are implicitly indebted toThe Long Day Closes—the masterwork by one of Great Britain’s finest directors,Terence Davies.Amid societal oppression, Davies turned to movies for escapism as a child,but his memories are not purely saccharine.
Terence Davies’ Conflicted Feelings of His Childhood Are Expressed in ‘The Long Day Closes'
Terence Davies, who died in 2023, never made a film that wasn’t close to the heart,particularly in his seminal autobiographical dramaslikeDistant Voices, Still LivesandTime and the City. His ability to recall uber-specific feelings and memories from the past and evoke a sentiment from a fleeting era was pure magic.“Being in the past makes me feel safe because I understand that world,“Davies said in a 2022 interview, explaining why he never makes movies with contemporary settings. He may understand life and its milieu better from years past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s found comfort in that world.
Davies' masterpiece,The Long Day Closes, aggressively grapples with the director’s youth from the ages of seven to eleven years of age. During this period, whichDavies described as being “sick with happiness,“he was raised without a father, who died of cancer. Being openly gay, Davies' most autobiographical film, released in 1992,confronts his suffocating societal oppression that could only be healed through the ephemeral power of movies.The film is aperfect distillation of Davies' paradoxical feelings towards his youth. An overwhelming sickness makes the world feel haunted, but he has a comforting resource to fuel him with muted happiness, altogether amounting to nostalgic melancholy.
‘The Long Day Closes’ Romanticizes Movies With Caution
We can learn the most about ourselves at our gloomiest, and that sense of clarity dominatesThe Long Day Closes. Set in Liverpool in the 1950s, the film follows Davies' stand-in, Bud (Leigh McCormack), who lives with his mother and siblings, where he often zones out andreflects on the music and movies he’s consumed to carry him through the anguish of poverty and school.Davies' film, which premiered at theCannes Film Festival, is a lyrical odyssey of one boy’s disillusioned life, and there ishardly any plot to summarize. Rather than taking us through the journey of his adolescence like most coming-of-age stories,Davies conducts a symphony of longing, regret, and transient beauty from the perspective of a reticent child. The most consequential and traumatic moments in his life are conveyed through his solemn expressions, as he resorts to the one source that makes him feel accepted.
The most ingenious narrative decision Davies makes is to rarely show Bud sitting in a movie theater and watching a motion picture with his own eyes. Instead, we only hear the dialogue and rousing musical scores of movies he’s watched in the past, which play over his troubled life filled with sadness.Bud’smemories of his moviegoingexperiences are conveyed through mesmerizing fantasy sequences,with the signature scene being scored byDebbie Reynolds' song, “Tammy,"—an awe-inspiring poetic composition of high-angle shots capturing Bud’s environment, infused with the romanticism that is lacking in his everyday life.The Long Day Closesis not for the cynical, nor will it appeal to those who can’t engage with emotionally charged, elliptical storytelling. While these imaginative sequences underscore the rapturous feelings provided by movies,they do not paint the cinematic experience as a purely holy exercise like most “falling in love at the movies” autobiographies.For every moment of triumph for Bud, there is a countering feeling of alienation.
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The Long Day Closestaps into Terence Davies' “sick with happiness” childhood description, but the director doesn’t try to forcefully articulate to the viewer what the movies of his youth explicitly represent.Davies captures the ineffable, oftentimes overpowering quality of cinema that can’t be described in words.Like a youngSteven SpielbergwatchingThe Greatest Show on EarthinThe Fabelmans, our formative movies transcend language. This sensation is frequently identified by filmmakers in their autobiographical movies. However,Davies miraculously illustrates this romanticism that we all hold.
The Long Day Closes
