dMYD DVD
Starring Pete Postlethwaite and a Load of Other Amazing People Who You’ve Never Heard Of
Y
Who’d have thought Woody Allen would ever look like a bombastic madman with a jockstrap full of happiness? Released a year after the neurotic ginger-snap’s own family album Radio Days, Distant Voices sees lost auteur Terrance Davies pick apart his own synapses for memories of 1940s Liverpool, with all the hard-drinking, sing-songs and pent-up emotional nut-cracking that the time and place entails. This is a poverty-lumpen British street just a couple of short decades away from being saved byThe Beatles, and as such it’s no walk in the park; essentially misery business all the way through, there’s little light for the family at its core save for the near endless stream of traditional songs that pepper the scenes in the pub and living room gatherings, a constant reminder of the universal hurt and hope that human lungs can spread.
Like Radio Days it’s a fragmentary journey through an old man’s childhood, but unlike Captain Quip Davies relies on a mastery of framing, filters and face-fucking excellence in the field of subtlety to get by. There’s no plot to speak of, but the overbearing lovehate of Pete Postlethwaite’s ‘Father’ falls like a jagged shadow over the rest of the family, the tragedies and small triumphs of one man’s life filtering through every moment of their days and every action and decision they make. All the actors present a perfect performance, the fractured narrative makes you feel you’re trapped in the house with them like a pervert coalman, and the absolute control of Davies’ lens makes the whole thing a genius moving photo album, a lyrical mind-bomb of emotions and social comment that’ll leave you desperate to scrub the defining images out of your head. Candles at Christmas, hay in a loft, the terrifying shatter of plate glass windows and the relentless rain outside the front door; all combine to form a wonderful fever-dream that rewards repeated viewings, sedating and challenging at the same time. It’s tempting to avoid aueurist works like this after a day of work and the shitty wet paint of real life, to leap straight to whatever the Stath or Cage is doing this week on Channel Five and tell the world to go rip it’s Face Off or get Cranked, but suck it up; relax, take one night to watch something different and you’ll get a lifetime’s worth of cinematic gold, a sometimes horrific, sometimes almost holy glimpse into a world you can’t ever know or knew too well to step back from. And that’s what people with more critical credentials call a masterpiece, a work that’s intensely personal, but also terrifyingly universal. In this case they’re probably right.
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