‘Why did you marry him?’
Only music has the power to transport you back to a specific point in your past in a matter of seconds. Distant Voices, Still Lives explores this phenomenon whilst also providing a tableau of working-class life in Liverpool in the ’40s and ’50s. The second in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical films from director Terence Davies, Distant Voices is an impressionistic and poignant journey to a different era…
The Davies’s are a typical low-income family in Liverpool presided over by a tyrannical matriarch (Pete Postlethwaite). The rest of the family is made up of their genial mother Nell (Freda Dowie) and siblings Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), Eileen (Angela Walsh) and Tony (Dean Williams).
Told non-chronologically, Davies’ film instead picks random moments from the lives of the Davies family including funerals and weddings and everything in between. The action is broken up by the cast singing old songs in a Liverpool completely unaware that The Beatles and the swinging sixties are just around the corner. There is perhaps a little too much singing for my taste, but the many scenes that take place in various local pubs are beautifully rendered providing an authentic and powerful depiction of working-class life. Indeed, these scenes brought to mind my old childhood spent running around the pubs of South Yorkshire high on salt and vinegar crisps and pints of coke.
Distant Voices, Still Lives will be too arty for some, but I loved the combination of kitchen sink realism and experimental modernism and it dredged up some memories and emotions that I hadn’t revisited for a long while. A salient and cosy cinematic experience.