I watched The Long Day Closes (1992) because I loved director Terence Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2000). But The Long Day Closes was much different and much worse. The film is a sort-of-autobiographical account of a young boy growing up in a poor section of Liverpool in the early and mid-1950s. There is no plot. This takes some getting used to. His mother hangs up the clothes; she is obvious good at it; the clothes line is indoors. The young boy retrieves a bottle of beer from a window sill. I’ll bet that one of his older sisters had been drinking it, closed the window, and then went to the front steps. The bottle has a cup on top. The boy goes to the front steps and gives the bottle and cup to her.
From what Terence Davies has said in interviews about his new documentary film about Liverpool, I’d guess The Long Day Closes has something to do with his life-long fascination with time and memory. The movie is essentially from the boy’s perspective. What I found most interesting is how the young lad’s two older brothers and two older sisters just seemed to get boyfriends or girlfriends, go off to a dance, and get married, as if they were simultaneously an important part of the kid’s life and something he couldn’t relate to. But the disadvantage is that we, the viewers, don’t get to know the siblings, just the boy and to some extent his mother.
The Long Day Closes was nominated for the Golden Palm in 1992, so some serious film people thought it seriously good. But I was more dazed and confused as to who would make such a film. Ironically, in interviews, the 64-year old Davies is passionate, animated, and opinionated, ranting against 25-year olds with a film degree telling him how to write a script, snarling about the Americanization of England and its film industry (the fifty-first state, like Hawaii with bad weather), throwing in for good measure that being gay has ruined his life, and complaining is some detail about sloppy and inept film making. His articulate passion and The House of Mirth convince me that his new documentary will be worth seeing, but I won’t be searching out his five earlier movies.