the process of erosion
by Douglas Messerli
Terence
Davies (writer and director) The Long
Day Closes / 1992
Davies’
1992 autobiographical film, The Long Day
Closes, is less a cinematic narrative than it is a series of tableaux,
filled with the works’ “characters” shot head-on or in silhouette and
abstractions of shadows, wallpaper, carpets, blankets, and windows through
which we mostly witness the Liverpudlian rains. Each of these “still-lives” are
beautifully composed and framed with particular attention to form and texture,
and most are accompanied by music, popular musical numbers, folk songs, and
film scores, 35 in all.
The artfulness of these tableaux is, at
first sight, a bit irritating, particularly since nearly all of these figures
are such loving and perfect beings, the young boy Bud (Leigh McCormack)
presented as fresh-scrubbed cherub patiently taking in the world around him or
imagining it in terms of the films he has witnessed, his mother (Marjorie
Yates) as a handsome, long-suffering yet caring and joyful woman, and her elder
sons and their girlfriends as always pleasant and entertaining. Even a local
bricklayer, working outside the family’s window, is a strapping and muscular
man who, when he catches the young boy staring at him, responds with a knowing
wink. Even the constantly arguing neighbors make it apparent that they are
deeply in love. The only evil in this near-perfect panorama are Bud’s school
teachers, always ready to slap their student’s palms with a short switch, and
the three school-yard bullies, who taunt and occasionally beat Bud up. Yet even
then the boy seems to survive with a cheerful mien or calmly retreats to his
cinematically-inspired imagination. In Davies’ gorgeous color palette even the
Liverpool streets and run-down houses seem poetic. As the director has
admitted, this was the period of his own life, after the death of his father,
which he most loved. As a boy I lived—in a far more “protected” suburban community—during
those same years, and there was much I loved too (the movie makes open
references to several films I saw and enjoyed at the same period: Carousel, Meet Me In St. Louis, etc. And I too harbored Bud’s growing
homosexual urges; I also was taunted by school bullies. Yet I never could
imagine my world as so perfectly arranged as Davies’ friezes. And as beautiful
as his tableaux are, they smell of a highly artificed peephole-view of life.
Despite this, however, The Long Day Closes is highly moving, in
part, because we know, even from the carefully arranged floral arrangement and
formally floral-like characters of the credits, that this world is doomed soon
to “close,” that the “day” it describes is about to wither, just as the
flowers. As one of Bud’s incompetent professors points out to his students, the
world is subject everywhere to the “process or erosion” through rivers, wind,
glaciers, oceans, and the processes of life itself. Bud’s perfect work, in
short, is being slowly eroded. Bit by bit, his childhood perception of a
perfect world is eaten away, not only by the slaps across his wrists and the
pummels of his body, but through the gradual pulling away from home of his
brothers and their lovers (on one their jaunts he unsuccessfully begs to join
them), the falling out of friends (he painfully observes his best friend
joining another boy on their to the movies), and the process of aging we see
occurring on his mother’s face. Lice are found in his hair by the detestable
school nurse. Even the lovely patterns of wall-paper and shadows become, as the
movie progresses, more and more abstract, at times entirely distorting the
“real” world of his beloved house. The figures of his devout Catholicism become
increasingly carnal, a vision of Christ turning into a burly laborer not unlike
the handsome worker we see early in the film. From within, Bud’s growing sexual
urges threaten the placid world which he adores, forcing him more and more to
retreat into loneliness.
Accordingly the beautiful series of
tableaux that Davies presents us seem more and more as a series of nostalgic
snapshots as the film progresses, becoming, in the end, an album of images that
in their very frozenness lock out the brutal reality from which Bud has
imaginatively tried to protect himself. If the film collapses time, presenting
us with little temporal narrative, we nonetheless recognize that the
middle-class world which the director argues “had great beauty and depth and
warmth,” is being slowly rubbed away by the boy’s maturing awareness, his
increasing recognition of potential and uncontrollable danger, change, and
death, as well as his growing sense of his own “outsiderness.”
The poignancy of the film, accordingly,
arises from this false perception of the world. Bud’s “day,” with the
cobalt-colored night sky, must finally come to a close, Davies’ hero, just like
Orson Welles’ central figure in The
Magnificent Ambersons (which The Long
Day Closes references) getting his comeuppance for his blindness.
Los Angeles,
February 8, 2014
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