The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films: Part One
27 June 2009
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Peter Hoskin and Matthew d’Ancona count down the first 25 of The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films
33.
The Long Day Closes
(Terence Davies, 1992)
Welcome to what Terence Davies calls his ‘imagined country’: 1950s Liverpool, refracted through the memory of song fragments, half-heard conversations, acute colours and childhood pains. It’s a place which invites dewy-eyed nostalgia as much as it provokes bitterness; where community spirit and intolerance meet and reinforce one another. Despite these contradictions, and Davies’s self-confessed ‘born-again atheism’, The Long Day Closes strikes an elegiac tone which borders on the religious. The spiritual resonance of the final shot — the sun setting, as a choir performs the title hymn — matches anything in, say, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Quite simply: Davies is Britain’s foremost filmmaker alive today. PH
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