Terence Davies’s Liverpool family drama is frightening and deeply moving, with singing that earns every minute we spend listening. Some characters remain frustratingly remote, but this is a film we would urge a stranger to see.
Distant Voices, Still Lives asks us to follow a family through remembered occasions, with little help from a conventional plot. We think it is worth every bit of attention it asks for. Terence Davies writes and directs this account of working-class Liverpool life, drawing on his own childhood. Weddings and pub gatherings bring people together; memories of a violent father interrupt any comfortable enjoyment. The songs are frequent, and Davies gives us time to listen.
Pete Postlethwaite’s Father supplies the fear that makes such gatherings difficult to enjoy without reservation. His violence affects how we look at everyone around him, including those who are no longer children. Freda Dowie’s Mother has the harder task of making endurance interesting without turning it into a display of goodness. She succeeds because her restraint leaves room for weariness as well as affection. The family remains worth caring about even when being part of it looks intolerable.
William Diver and Patrick Duval photograph the family in subdued colour and compositions that often hold people still. The arrangements suggest family photographs, with everyone present but little explained about the relationships. We have time to study the faces and wonder who is comfortable standing beside whom. That suits a film concerned with what an adult can recover of childhood. It can also make the people seem difficult to approach.
Diver also edits, and the jumps between occasions keep us alert to what a gathering can bring back. We do not always get the connections immediately. A scene may register first as people sharing a song, then acquire weight through its place among the other recollections. That asks more work of us than a sequence of explanatory conversations would. Davies divides the film into two parts, each built around family occasions.
The women’s singing moved us more than we expected. In the shared songs, we could hear people allowing themselves feelings that life with Father has made hard to admit. Davies lets the popular music carry affection, disappointment and jokes. It matters that these are familiar songs performed by the people themselves, and that listening takes up so much of our time with them. At the pub, singing gives the women a chance to be heard by one another.
The cost of this approach is that some of the children remain harder to know than the adults. Angela Walsh’s Eileen, Lorraine Ashbourne’s Maisie and Dean Williams’s Tony can seem confined by the carefully arranged groups. There are moments when we want an ordinary exchange to continue, so that one of them can surprise us. Davies is so precise about what he remembers that he sometimes leaves too little room for that. His pauses will test anyone already struggling with the chronology.
At 84 minutes, this is short for a family chronicle, though it never seems in a hurry. Davies gives the singing space that another drama might use for explanations. The performances justify his patience, especially when the women sing together and momentarily make the family bearable. Watch it in one sitting, with the telephone out of reach.
