Beginning Friday, January 22 Living Room presents a special engagement of Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes in high-definition as part of our Best of British Independent Cinema Series! Terence Davies, whose films include Distant Voices, Still Lives; The Neon Bible; and The House of Mirth is considered by some to be the greatest living British filmmaker.
Terence Davies‘ lyrical hymn to childhood revisits the same territory as Distant Voices, Still Lives, this time focusing on his own memories of growing up in a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool.
Eleven-year-old Bud (a heartbreaking performance from Leigh McCormack) finds escape from the greyness of ’50s Britain through trips to the cinema and in the warmth of family life. But as he gets older, the agonies of the adult world; the casual cruelty of bullying, the tyranny of school and the dread of religion, begin to invade his life.
Time and memory blend and blur through Davies’ fluid camerawork; slow tracking shots, pans and dreamlike dissolves combine to create the world of Bud’s imagination and the lost paradise of his childhood.