Of Time and the City

Written and directed by: Terence Davies
Produced by: Roy Boulter and Solon Popadopoulos
Released: October 31

Terence Davies is regularly named as one of Britain's most important writer-directors, but it's been eight years since he made his last film, The House Of Mirth. So what is the great man's comeback offering after such a ridiculously long absence? Well, it's a 72-minute documentary, which doesn't sound very promising. And it was commissioned to mark Liverpool's European Capital Of Culture status, which sounds even less promising. Splicing together archive newsreel snippets to chart the history of working-class Merseyside from 1945, when Davies was born there, to 1973, when he moved away, it had the potential to be dull and self-indulgent—and in anyone else's hands it probably would have been.

But give it a chance. Somehow, Davies has woven the source material into a dreamlike film that floats between love song, stand-up routine, political diatribe, family album, and death-bed confession: the cinematic equivalent of a rich and varied life flashing before your eyes. Of Time And The City was heralded as a masterpiece when it premiered at Cannes in May, and it stands as a worthy companion piece to the director's most acclaimed dramas, 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives, and 1992's The Long Day Closes.

Instead of organising the footage into a textbook chronology, Davies arranges it according to his own wandering memory, layering the excellent soundtrack with heart-tugging classical music and weighty poetry, along with his own waspish voice-over, which is often pretty poetic itself. He recalls "when football, like life, was still played in black and white". There are evocative clips of labouring washer-women and skipping schoolchildren, bonfire nights and holiday beauty contests.
Looking outwards to national events, there's the Korean war and the Queen's coronation—the extravagant "Betty Windsor show"—as well as the coming of the Beatles, who seemed "like a firm of provincial solicitors". Eventually, the brick terraces of Davies's youth give way to concrete tower blocks, an example of "the British genius for creating the dismal".

The film commemorates an entire way of life, but it's also touchingly personal, as Davies, now 63, contemplates old age and death, and remembers struggling with his burgeoning homosexuality in the face of the church's proscriptions. Such an unusual, indefinable film isn't likely to be a box-office hit, unless audiences mistake it for a Sex And The City spin-off. But those that ignore their preconceptions will hope that they don't have to wait another eight years before Davies is back again.

Nicholas Barber