“In memory everything seems to happen to music.” – The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
When you’re a child, everything is your first. Both joy and trauma have equal power in one’s formation, and although the details of each event might slip away or alter, their impact does not. Following you throughout the years, few things remain as indelible as one’s introduction to shame, or the ecstasy of a winning moment, or, when least expected, the most proper song.
Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes involves itself with that period of life when innocence is at ebb tide, but the days have not yet lost their halcyon glow; when childhood still seems never ending and maturity remains but a shade on the horizon. The director has stated elsewhere that the scenes portrayed in the film represent the happiest years of his life. Indeed, from the opening with its rain-soaked, dilapidated alley (with possibly the most inspired use of the Hoagy Carmichael tune “Stardust” since Woody Allen’s in Stardust Memories) to the final shot of faint clouds against the moon as Arthur Sullivan’s “The Long Day Closes” plays in its sublime entirety—the artist seems to be almost in mourning for that vanished epoch.
The setting—1950s Liverpool—is faithfully reconstructed, but to dwell on the exactitude of its period detail would be to miss the point of The Long Day Closes. All that is interesting about the film is its depiction not only of bygone places and events, but of a maturer mind looking back on these bygone places and events with the sort of judgments (emotional, aesthetic, etc.) a childlike one would lack. It is not so much a “more objective” approach, as if to say there is an absence of bias; rather, it illustrates how one subjective POV, with the advantages of hindsight, objectifies its earlier iteration: embellishing, magnifying, and isolating at will. This is simply how memory—indeed, how art—works.
And the film, like most works dedicated to memory, eschews traditional plot structures in order to capture an essence, an atmosphere, of nostalgia and remembrance; it favors an episodic approach, with scenes oftentimes dissolving into one another both quickly and comparatively slowly. Davies, himself quite fond of the longer, 96 frame variety, uses these when transitioning between moments that are either straightforward recollections or spells of fantasy to languidly stylize the phenomenon of the mind hearkening back out of the present and into reverie.
In an exemplary passage, Davies’s use of dissolve illustrates this stylization of memory, as well as the aforementioned judgment(s): In a long overhead tracking shot, set to Debbie Reynolds’s rendition of “Tammy”, Davies employs a sequence of dissolves between the young protagonist, Bud’s, family life, school life, and church life.
The bird’s-eye-view placement of the camera establishes the kind of objectifying distance one might experience when surveying the past. By utilizing dissolve, Davies visualizes the experience of the days “blending” together in recall; and the use of the syrupy “Tammy” ironizes the scene, and this would be arguable even if one was not aware of the fact that Davies actually abhors the song, for the over-the-top romantic lyrics clash with the content on the screen, and there is additional irony with the voice-over of audio from Kind Hearts & Coronets to skewer the priest shown in the church shot.
While some viewers, who miss the irony, read a sad, nostalgic longing into the passage, a more accurate reading would be closer to a kind of weary, sardonic (bordering on contemptuous) remembrance. The resulting judgment, here, is far from worshipful idealization of the past, which nicely balances out the moments when Davies is clearly more positive in his portrayal. Tying everything together is the camera, in the second dissolved-to shot, tracking the projector light as it beams through a theater full of cigarette smoke—film as memory, indeed.
Professor Kristin Thompson, in her own commentary on this passage, says that “it is difficult to imagine the scene done with straight cuts rather than dissolves. The theater, church, and school flow together through their graphic similarity and the soft transitions that blend them as the shot changes. If cinema can be poetry, perhaps Terence’s dissolves become the equivalent of rhymes.”
Well, not “rhymes,” per se, as the shot-transition in film might be better compared to enjambment, in poetry, but the point stands: In order to recreate the languorous, flowing quality that memory often possesses, the dissolve is the correct technique for Davies to favor.
There is much to admire about The Long Day Closes, even if one cannot call it a masterpiece. (Its concerns are, perhaps, too limited, its purview too purposefully truncated and/or fleeting for it to earn the expansiveness and deep insight that the label suggests.) While there is in contemporary moviemaking an annoying tendency to stick a song to every scene in order to expound on its meaning (or to be caustically ironic), or to over-reference so as to establish the filmmakers’ cred, the soundtrack and references Davies utilizes in The Long Day Closes—the waltz from Carousel, an audio clip from Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, even a funny impersonator of Edward G. Robinson who was likely inspired by a real person in Davies’s life, etc.—function as part and parcel of Davies’s concern with memory, illustrating how pieces of media, a la Proust’s madeleine, can resurrect and re-vivify what once was, or how they are enduringly connected to events of the past simply by their association.
Also of note is Davies’s staging: He is keen on placing his characters within framed shapes, whether they be windows or theater-entrance walls or corridors. In one shot, he even creates a sort of Christmas-card tableau with the members of Bud’s family. The artifice of his project is made obvious, but that’s the point. Memory writes, edits, and directs.
And Bud’s perspective is not the only perspective Davies gives some measure of eminence. In one scene, Bud’s mother holds him while singing the Irish folk tune “She Moved Through the Fair” and she remembers her father, Granddad O’Brien, to the point of tears. (Marjorie Yates, as the Mother, is likely the standout performance in the film.) Who has not experienced a moment like this, when one witnesses a parent struggle between the overwhelm of their own emotions and the protection of their child’s naiveté?
I cannot help but think of my childhood, after witnessing Bud’s (and Davies’s). There was no clear Edenic period, and although my father was not nearly as cruel as Davies’s—no father figure is present in The Long Day Closes, although the knowledge of the real man’s barbarism acts as a specter over certain aspects of the film, such as the Mother’s sadness or Bud’s anxieties over his homosexuality—he did not die, allowing for the smaller cruelties to persist. But you look back and take what’s remembered and give it whichever feeling seems necessary for the moment.
There is an extended take in the film when Davies holds for what seems like an eternity on a section of the rug in Bud’s home. There is no reason for this shot other than to capture the rug and its dull pattern, as well as the light changing across it. And to capture time, as it changes, too—the song playing over the shot is George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad. One thinks of how slowly the seconds move, and of Britain, maybe, in young Bud’s time and now; but also of one’s own childhood home, and how it really is the damned old rug one remembers, and treasures, after so many years, over everything else. It was a kitchen rug, for me, more colorful but smaller than Bud’s. I remember this, and other things. And I remember my mother crying, too.
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