Review of Of Time and the City

When I read the newspapers' reviews of Terence Davies "Of Time and the city" and they mentioned words like tone poem, melancholy recollection, I thought hmmm I'm going to enjoy this. Well let's start from the beginning, this autobiographical documentary of Liverpool , if it was a memoir full of Mahler and nostalgia it would be wonderful and to be fair it starts really well, with a black and white image of industrial Liverpool over which he quotes in his posh northern voice A.E.Housman's Blue Remembered hills, from A Shropshire Lad. And you think oh good, but then he goes on to make some banal statement and tags Karl Marx's name on the end of it to give it some cultural or political significance and for the next couple of minutes banal statement is followed my banal statement each ascribed to some great thinker from the higher cannon of western culture. He constantly has to display how well read he is in the early part of the movie, to an embarrassing degree, a silly statement is a silly statement no matter the eminence of the man who made it. Also the enjoyment of the film was spoiled my his curious pronunciation at times, he would be quoting some line of poetry or making some observation and he would rush to the end of a sentence with a great whooshing sound which completely subverted the intention of the text, bizarre. There are moments which are genuinely moving of which Davis can take no credit ; a winter park covered in snow, old women carrying their washing back from the washhouse on their heads, it's the nostalgia we bring to it as a viewer that gives it such potency, a society now vanished for good or ill. When I saw those black and white images I was transported back to my own lost childhood to my two dead parents to those lost familiar times. I love Terence Davies, I love his films he is a man of the highest sensibilities I want him to find personal and professional happiness, but this film has been over praised. I think everyone is aware that he has not made a movie for a number of years so they are desperate that this is a return to form, which it is not, and that it is a commercial success which I believe it is in art house terms. I just hope that he will find it easier to get financial support with his next film through his higher visibility in this, and in the next we shall all see his real ambition. Now it's my chance to show off, Davies takes his title for his documentary from the American author Thomas Wolfe's novel 'Of Time and the River' {1935}