Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
liked it.
Of Time and the City is a documentary filled with mixed and (seemingly) contradictory points-of-view about its subject, the city of Liverpool as it has existed over the last 50 years. Written, produced, directed, and narrated by
Terence Davies, a veteran filmmaker/writer/actor (and native of the city), the 74-minute film is a highly subjective and provocative personal account of the joys and miseries -- private and social, spiritual and economic -- of life and a youth spent in the port city, most famous since the mid-'60s as the birthplace of
The Beatles (who are seen, but never heard, in the film). Davies has several axes to grind against the powers-that-be (or were) in British society, including the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, hypocritical government authorities (especially those responsible for enforcing the moral offenses laws, which prohibited homosexual acts until the second half of the 1960s), and the monarchy, supported in what Davies regards as grotesque luxury on the backs of millions of working-class Britons, who endured decades of hardship from the start of the worldwide economic depression until long after the end of World War II.
Davies makes no secret of his dislike and resentment of these targets, but balances it with a deep compassion for the working-class neighbors he knew and lived among, growing up in relative privation from his birth in 1945 until the end of the 1950s. Davies' cutting wit slashes with unrestricted verbosity amid footage of the English class system's inequities at their worst (never more so than with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II or, as he refers to it, "The Betty Windsor Show"). He isn't much kinder to well-meaning urban planners who destroy spread-out, wretched horizontal slums and replace them with high-rise vertical slums that are, if anything, even less visually appealing and no better a solution to poverty.
For all of his criticism of the poverty imposed and maintained by the British class system, and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church in which he was raised -- which professed to want him, but condemned the homosexuality about which he could do nothing -- Davies also savors the remembered joys of times such as Guy Fawkes Day, and the beauty of the architecture of churches and cathedrals from the city's heyday in the 19th century to their less awe-inspiring successors of recent years. He also fondly recalls the fun fairs (what Americans call amusement parks) and the occasional days out in Brighton that were the only relief that many of the poor could get from the relentless grind of poverty, as well as the delights of small "luxuries" such as fresh fruit at Christmas.
Davies makes excellent use of vintage footage of the city, and its overhead railway, as well as its docks, and surviving films of slums that should have been a disgrace to any developed European country (and, in America, would surely have yielded up insurrection). But this is a film that communicates on several levels at once, so as we see such sights -- as well as the exalted cathedral interiors, and coronation scenes -- we also get the music of
Gustav Mahler (Davies' favorite composer, apparently), John Tavener, Fauré, Brahms, Liszt,
Peggy Lee, the Liverpool Spinners, et al. In addition, Davies utilizes quotations from T.S. Eliot, Carl Jung, and others (plus a derisive quote of a phrase associated with
The Beatles, but none of their music). It is the epigrams, which come between some heartbreaking moments (such as an audio interview with an elderly woman recalling being left at 14 to care for two siblings, one only a year old, following the death of her mother and her father's going to sea), that may be a little too well-represented. One wishes that Davies had dialed back the quotations a bit, perhaps using two or three fewer -- it might have made his film easier to absorb in one gulp. But this is still a film worth seeing, for a side of English life that isn't spoken of much (now that even the Labour Party has abandoned the labor electorate) and a critique of that nation's 20th century politics and economic policies that you won't see in too many history books. And it makes some of the most inventive use of the last movement of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ever committed to film. Coupled with a razor-sharp verbal thrust and highly romanticized memories of the "dark" (i.e. forbidden) side of his youthful and adolescent lusts, the film is a piercing and personal, amusing and weighty meditation on its subjects, both large and small, with the city itself a conduit for some savage social commentary. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide