Supplied

OF TIME AND THE CITY
Directed and narrated by Terence Davies. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri-Mon, May 22-25.
****
The first image we see in Of Time and City is the giant screen in a vintage movie palace, the curtains closed, the footlights bathing them in a pregnant red glow. The first sound we hear is director Terence Davies reciting A.E. Housman’s famous lines from A Shropshire Lad — the ones about “those blue remembered hills ... those happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.” And then, as the melancholy strains of Liszt’s “Consolation No. 3” play on the soundtrack, the curtains part, and footage of Davies’ home town of Liverpool takes over the screen. You can travel those highways again, it seems, if you can call watching scratchy black-and-white newsreels travelling — and if you can call those grimy Liverpool streets “happy.” Later in the film, Davies mentions British building designers’ singular talent for the dismal; by that criterion, Liverpool is the architecture capital of the United Kingdom.

Of Time and the City was one of several projects commissioned by the City of Liverpool after it was named the first European Cultural Capital in 1998. But as anyone who’s seen his films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes will know, if you want someone to write a love letter to Liverpool, Davies is not the man you want to hire. (He doesn’t even like The Beatles, for God’s sake — he dismisses their music as so much mindless “yeah yeah yeah.”)

No, Davies’ chief memories of Liverpool are of the cheerless childhood he spent in grim row houses — although, as a homosexual living in a working-class Catholic neighbourhood, his adolescence wasn’t much happier. Occasionally the monotony would be relieved by trips to the beach (the meagre pleasures of which Davies describes here in witheringly precise detail), but his only real sources of joy were the poetry of Keats and Shelley (which his narration quotes at length), the music of Mahler and Bruckner, and the glorious Hollywood movies that he devoured at the local cinema.

But if Davies has little patience for Liverpool’s institutions — the church, the schools, the monarchy — he does find something to love in the faces of the people who inhabit it. One of the few contemporary pop songs he plays approvingly in the film is “Dirty Old Town” by The Pogues, with its lyrics about dreaming a dream by the old canal, kissing a girl by the factory wall, and smelling the spring on the smoky wind — in other words, glimpsing beauty even in the grimiest location. Of Time and the City’s most moving sections are Davies’ montages of children playing in the street or young people dressed up on Saturday night to hit the bars — he sets these sequences to some of Mahler and Sibelius’ most soaring melodies, in a way that ennobles his subjects instead of diminishing them.

The film Of Time and the City most resembles is Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, another deeply personal film about a director’s relationship to the somewhat shabby town where he grew up. (Both films even open with rhyming shots of train travel.) Maddin’s film is more fanciful, more forgiving of his city’s faults, and ultimately more likable, Davies’ grouchy wit has much to recommend it too — I especially savoured his line about how The Beatles made the previous generation of pop songs sound “as antiquated as antimacassars or curling tongs.”

What a missed opportunity that Edmonton didn’t try commissioning a similar project during our stint as Canada’s official cultural capital! I doubt any director could have gotten away with producing something as acerbic and iconoclastic as Of Time and the City, but I would’ve liked to have seen someone like Trevor Anderson make the attempt. Care to try anyway, Trevor?