Highly Stylistic Portrait of a British Family

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) - dir. Terence Davies - 3.5 stars

Davies' autobiographical film was essentially shot as two separate films at different times with the same actors. The partition is made very clear as the parts are titled separately within the film. The first part, 'Distant Voices,' covers the tightly-knit family's memories of the father of the house. Most of the memories depict how the family stuck together throughout years of violence inflicted by the father. It also serves in developing the characters, but paints a pretty stereotypical violent father role. The second part, 'Still Lives,' mainly focuses on the lives of the family's remaining members after the father's death. It is not a hopeful final part to the film, as it highlights that all the other members have gotten into their own terror-inflicted households. Escaping from one violent household, only to become the main actress of one's own violent household.

As the title suggests, the film stylistically feels very still, like a selection of family portraits that come alive and provide snippets of information about the family. Davies doesn't try too hard to tie these small informational pieces together and leaves it up to the viewer to make sense out of the whole picture. Having said that, it is quite easy to tie the knots and arrive at the overall meaning. Going back to the stylistic aspects of the film, the use of extremely smooth camera work feels very modern, even in our time. The stylistic weight is so prominent in the film that the work comes off as mainly an art piece, rather than a fictional, realistic story-telling device.

Another interesting aspect of the film was the extensive use of music to convey a sense of melancholy and drive the plot. The majority of the script consists of traditional British songs, which seem preferred over dialogs. Coupled with the camera work and the highly stylistic mise-en-scene, the music completes the atmospheric value of the film. Even though it's not the best film I've seen, it is a film that "comes as close to poetry on film as possible" as one of IMDB's users suggest. Davies should be more prominently touted as one of Britain's best film makers.