DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES
**** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Terence Davies With Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Dean Williams, Lorraine Ashbourne, Debi Jones, Michael Starke, and Vincent Maguire.
Or consider the word “achronological.” The emphasis of emotional continuity over narrative continuity, the hallmark of several films directed by Alain Resnais (including Hiroshima, mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Je t’aime, je t’aime, and Providence), is certainly present here, but at the same time the overall film is structured around a certain narrative progression. The first part, “Distant Voices,” pivots around the funeral of the father (Pete Postlethwaite) and the wedding of the older sister, Eileen (Angela Walsh), both in the early 50s. It includes memories of an air raid during World War II (in an underground shelter the father orders the child Eileen to sing something; she responds with the “Beer Barrel Polka” and is gradually joined by all the others), and ends with the birth and baptism of Eileen’s first child. The second part, “Still Lives,” carries us through the wedding of the younger sister, Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), and ends with the wedding of Tony (Dean Williams), the youngest of the three siblings.
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Stylistically, the two parts form a coherent whole, apart from the frequent use in the second part of fade-outs to white. Both sections were processed in the lab in a highly distinctive manner that leaves the silver nitrate in the print and desaturates colors in order to emphasize textures; the same process was used in Nineteen Eighty-Four to emphasize grays and blues. Davies employed various filters and gels in order to highlight the browns and implemented this strategy further by using costumes in earth tones.
Another shot shows the four remaining members of the family entering the hearse, followed by a dissolve to the same family posing again, in the same spot, this time for Eileen’s wedding. Over the sound of rain again, Eileen says, “I wish me dad was here,” to which Maisie replies, “I don’t.” There’s an offscreen aural flashback to a quarrel between Maisie and her father about her wanting to go to a dance, a quarrel that a moment later we see as well as hear: Maisie is scrubbing the floor in the cellar, and the brief scene ends abruptly with the father tossing coins on the floor and then beating her with a broom.
Davies, like Chaplin and McCarey, regards strong emotions and sentimentality as authentic and even indispensable tools for understanding and dealing with life. This can be seen in the sequence when Davies’s use of pop music is superficially closest to Potter’s. One of the daughters, as a little girl, is watching her mother, seated on a second-story windowsill, wash the outside of the window. A cut to a reverse angle shows the mother washing the same panes from inside the house, and as the camera slowly tracks toward her, we hear Ella Fitzgerald singing her dreamy version of “Taking a Chance on Love.” The song continues over an abrupt jump cut to a different scene downstairs, in which the father grabs the mother, dragging her and beating her to the floor (out of frame), repeatedly screaming “Shut up!” in response to her cries of pain. Then, as the song continues to the end of the chorus, another jump cut shows the mother’s bruised face in profile, followed by a slow pan down to her bruised arm as she polishes the furniture.
I’m not just thinking of Batman’s melancholia, James Bond’s bitterness, or Indiana Jones’s frustration. I’m also thinking of the catalogs of physical and/or emotional punishment meted out to the characters in nearly all the movies I’ve seen this summer, including The Abyss, Dead Poets Society, The Karate Kid Part III, Lethal Weapon 2, Lock Up, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, Turner & Hooch, Uncle Buck, Weekend at Bernie’s, and When Harry Met Sally . . .
Davies’s explanation may sound capricious, but in fact this is far from the only nonrealistic shot in the film; the film’s emotional continuity grants Davies an enormous stylistic freedom, and he takes full advantage of it without ever compromising his vision. Just as many incidents are conveyed without narrative explanation, certain others have a hallucinatory power that suggests that they might represent dreams rather than literal events, and here again, Davies’s grip on his subject is so sure and absolute that no sense of loss or confusion results from this lack of clarification. One of the strongest sequences begins with Eileen sobbing in her husband’s arms in a pub after her wedding and crying, “I want me dad!” A slow pan to the left gradually leads us into darkness, and then, without any apparent break, across a candlelit church interior where the family is praying. This dissolves into a lovely tracking shot moving in the same direction past a row of houses at Christmastime, accompanied by choral music, that finally ends in front of the Davies house, where we see the father dressing the Christmas tree inside. He says good night to his children (it is now years earlier than the scene in the pub), then later checks in on them and sees them all sleeping together in one bed; he says quietly, “God bless, kids,” and attaches a stocking to their bedpost. We next see the whole family praying at their Christmas dinner, and the father, sitting at the head of the table, starts to shake uncontrollably; then, in a single motion, he pulls off the tablecloth and all the dishes with it and yells, “Hey! Clear this up!”
