Usually, my response to films in this register is that I write down something right afterwards. This film has tried me for some months now. It is a long time since I have been stupefied for some minutes after the film has ended, and then have given way to sobs out of outer beauty.
I have to say right away that Terence Davies equates the long day of paradisaical childhood with the closure our life takes, and this is a take no great romantic poet has taken the chance, perhaps the cinematic chance, to express it so fully in images. And with such musical allegiance.
Oh, to be exhausted in beauty! This is the destiny Terence Davies has in trust for us. None to my knowledge, even Bill Douglas to whom Terence Davies pays homage, has given us perhaps the definitive song childhood-to-adolescence love gives its shape to. It took me twice to gather that in the beginning, the rainy, abandoned street is the one early Bud meets for the last time his presumably co-pupil, as he passes him through with another boy to engage in play.
"The little stars climb, always reminding me that we're apart. You wandered down the lane and far away, leaving me a song that will not die" is what the voice of Charles Ray initiates us to through rain that falls onto that aforementioned abandoned street. But is it really abandoned? is what Davies' film asks us throughout. It gives way to vignettes coming out of childhood with such unabashed nostalgia and lyricism, but always, purposefully, vignettes, that it is a privilege of questioning only the great English and Irish poets Davies draws from have allowed.
The image on the carpet so many childhoods have visited, turns now to the windowpane with music that only hints its epic potential via a slight turn of the camera. Soon afterwards, after a sublimely pathetic engagement of mother singing ancient tunes embracing the child, the child sitting by its own on the stairs (stairs the French say are so full of talking), opens up to a scene of shocking beauty with the whole family - mother occupying the front as Christ in the Last Dinner -wishing to Bud happy X-mas, while they are out in the street (that too, took twice a siting), and Mahler's music accompanies Bud and us to this private enraptured witnessing. Here the power passes from the ground to the eyes directly, suffused with an elegiac sustenance that follows out the rest of the film.
Yet look also how the chirpy talk of the neighbors' informs the last chapter of initiation into what language in a fully telling and seductive way is. And then the camera lovingly revisits all places that define childhood in a cultural manner: cinema, religion, education. I here opt for the larger categories each place stands for in the sequence, for "Tammy" the song tells me so: the cinematic ray, and the summoning bell, and the film or radio transcripts that interfere with memory.
The film transcripts. Ashes fall as it is evocative, and the camera moves for a final appreciation, as they trace their course. Then there's a tiny comic interlude (our teacher said - what? a serious false information, but, oh! so comically delightful!) before the Victorian astonishing attack. The long day closes in an overlapping of music and abandoning image over a submerged by light and clouds sky, descending, descending- Over what? Over the boys' last roof, the image on the carpet, the out-door X-mas and the common, local feast, the Dali-informed boo of the Christ as he turns over on the Cross, the melding and celebrating of the colors and sound (what a terrific sound design!) over what washes childhood. Away? It washed over me. It did.
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