draperhacker Review of Distant Voices, Still Lives

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Beautiful and evocative movie dealing with domestic violence

[10/10 · 22 February 2012]

This is one of the most moving films I have ever seen. Having read the previous reviews I can see the polarity of appreciation but I am firmly with the reviewers who see the film as a moving evocation of times and emotions of yesterday but that still has a resonance today. Although the film's narrative is more of an emotional roller coaster than a chronological device and shot through the lens of a son less loved than hoped if you can give yourself up to the emotional extremes the film offers a journey through a life that doesn't offer answers just the remembered high's and lows. As someone who lived a life so closely to the family in the movie it could almost have been my own I can appreciate the way the film has been approached in an attempt to map the extremes of the good times and the bad times. Isn't this the way we all look back? Who remembers the incidental details of life that don't make an impression? I couldn't possibly attempt to re-tell my whole life but I could certainly in the telling, probably end up with a story pretty much in line with this movie except not nearly as well told or revealed in such stunning images. For those whose lives may have little connection with this kind of family, it's revelations or the times I ask you to understand that its unrelenting grimness and violence does find a balance in the comfort of family and loved ones. For those who feel the movie didn't go far enough and the lens romanticizes domestic violence, I ask you to consider for those of us who lived through this journey that clinging onto and juxtaposing so abruptly the good times against the lows that in retrospect this was the only way to find some way or sense to a life where there was many a time where the negative far outweighed the positive. I find this movie so cathartic and it always leaves me with a sense of peace knowing that ultimately its is love in whatever form wins the day.