| Review:
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Like a long, bickering marriage or a favorite pair
of well worn out shoes, UK combo filmmaker and nostalgia
buff Terence Davies can't seem to resolve his unsettling
but addictive love/hate relationship with the city of origin
that informed his imagination for better or worse, in his
latest ode to Liverpool, Of Time And The City.***
The third Davies intimate excursion down memory lane
after The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives,
this whimsical autobiographical documentary is also graced
with the eloquent, at times cranky bordering on bitter narrative
commentary by the writer/director, situated somewhere between
travelogue and ambivalent urban reverie.***
Favoring a literary subjectivity that tends to soar
above an often dismal post WW II inner city terrain, Davies,
quoting a gamut of wisdom from Proust to Engels, saturates
his industrial mindscapes with contemplations steeped in
alternate resentment and regret. And when he bemoans, in
quoting from Chekhov that 'The golden moments pass and leave
no trace,' we are led on the contrary to understand that
this visual history resolves to actually rage against the
dying of that particular light. And one in which that trying
but noble mass resistance to the paradox of individual extinction
and passing time, is distilled in that seemingly meaningless
but ever courageous determination as 'humanity gets through
another day.'***
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Final Words:
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Of Time And The City, like life,
often stumbles along in raw, jarring fashion but with always
surprising luminescent moments to share, as the soundtrack
incongruously clashes with the snapshot images, then suddenly
captivates when settling on a crafted frame that perfectly
fuses perception with meaning. And not without the occasional
subversive wit that lightens the sobering mood, as when Davies
playfully observes of the teeming, exhausted masses of the
Liverpool ghettos, 'The trouble with being poor is that it
takes up all your time, and the trouble with being rich is
that it takes up everyone else's.'*** |
