Director Terence Davies

I have certainly watched a variety of films over the last fortnight. This was definitely my favourite. It swept me up, whereas The Green Ray and Radio On engaged only my curiosity and my brain. I don’t know how autobiographical it is: scenes of a boy’s life in 1950’s Liverpool, his loving family, the magic of the cinema, the brutality of his new school and the guilt-inducing teachings of the Roman Catholic faith – particularly for a boy attracted to his own sex. Memories are heightened: the rain always lashes down, women’s lipsticks are as red as can be, everyone has a good singing voice, his mother is the epitome of lovingness, the wonderful dream-like tableau of his family at Christmas straight out of Hollywood. The nit nurse is witch-like (rather as Miss Gulch turned into the Wicked Witch of the West) and the teachers are Dickens’s caricatures. Via the film, the ex-child shows how the long day – his carefree happiness? – closed with his new school, growing up, his former playmates running off to the cinema without calling for him; refusing to run after them, he retreats to the coal cellar, the shadow of the area railings and loneliness.

Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes.

The soundtrack is every bit as significant as Radio On. The opening credits are like a lush Hollywood biopic, written in copperplate so elegant that it’s almost unreadable. The music is, I think (I could check), that which The Ladykillers appear to play as they plan their crime, and the opening scene is very much like that street . . . and, yes, here is Alec Guinness’s voice enquiring about a room. You read the screen images as carefully as any religious painting. Thresholds, front doors, narrow staircases are as significant as St Lucy’s eyes on a plate. When he’s standing in the lashing rain outside the cinema asking an adult to take him in – shades of Gene Kelly about to start singing in the rain?

Strange how the sentimental scenes in Dead of Winter left me cold but in this film I basked in their warmth. Perhaps because they left space for/contrasted with other emotions – and perhaps because I suddenly recalled that my father used to sing when I was a child. Even now I can hear him singing “The voice in the old village choir” (“accompanied” by me as the bells’ dongs) – now there’s a whole meta-chain of nostalgia!