In The House of Mirth (2000), a yacht cuts through the silvery surface of the northern Atlantic while the camera dollies from bow to stern, as if caressing it. A similar movement occurs in Sunset Song (2015): a glide over the evil mud of the Marne while on the soundtrack a robust male voice croons a hymn. His head a-swarm with memories of the dead and beloved, an aged Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2022) yields to the words of Wilfred Owen. That moment of sensual lyricism in the late Terence Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton would seem to be as antithetical to that novel’s acerbic, almost truculent spirit as a guffaw at a wake, just as those surrenders to music and poetry in the later films happen without the consent of his characters. Those tensions sustained the films through many viewings
Terence Davies devoted a cinema to the swoon and the submission. Nature, geography, and family shape his men and women. For this most Catholic of filmmakers destiny is like original sin: a fact and a blight, not a condemnation. In a world of self-help and inexorable positivity, the way his characters see desires unfulfilled sets them up for a life on earth that is closer to a purgatorial fire through which they must pass before catching the faintest glimpse of heaven. The Emily Dickinson of A Quiet Passion (2017) and the Sassoon of Benediction write a poetry molded by their commitment to a solitude no less acute for being grounded in loss. But not for the Liverpool-born Davies the craggy Jansenism of Robert Bresson or the giddy capriciousness of Luis Buñuel, to cite two directors whose Catholicism burned as steadily as a hearth fire: his characters let go of pleasure to become more themselves. They practice losing farther, losing faster, as Elizabeth Bishop wrote. Because he proved such a master at wielding his camera, the films don’t pummel or punish. I think of the boy in The Long Day Closes (1991), captured in close-up staring out the window at a beautiful young laborer who far from being repelled by the attention visibly swells. The boy recognizes his own homosexuality; the young man is grateful for the flattery. With such kindnesses his characters are consoled; we are put on this temporal plane to administer kind gestures.
“It might seem counterintuitive, but, yes, Davies’ films were musicals, a genre that exists in the space between the public and the private self,” writes Michael Koresky in his obit. “These were often deeply interior works, which moved to the external rhythms of songs and melodies that were profoundly meaningful to him.” No living director excelled at limning memory and loss and desire and finally collapsing their meaningful distinctions. Influenced by the kitchen sink realism of Tony Richardson and Jack Clayton, Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), and Death and Transfiguration (1983), as impressive as they are as fully realized short films, point to a road much trodden; Davies could have competed with Ken Loach and Mike Leigh as a realist directing films about what Wallace Stevens called the malady of the quotidian, with gay overtones. Instead this lifelong admirer of Joyce and Eliot, of Liszt and “Dirty Old Town, perfected the associative and the indirect. The dissolves, the use of music, the aforementioned tracking shots — he granted his men and women interiority without succumbing to the temptation of psychology.
To assert that this man, the youngest of ten children who admitted in the free-associative documentary Of Time and the City (2010) that he loathed his homosexuality, ranked among the best chroniclers of heterosexual erotic play is to stake a claim for the observational acumen of the outsider and the marginalized. His camera ravished lovers in heat: Eric Stoltz and Gillian Anderson in The House of Mirth, Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea (2012). He understood the situation of women, themselves outsiders and marginalized despite or because of their talents. In strategically deployed close-ups of Anderson he shows how the mores of a high society peopled with marionettes squeeze her as tightly as her corset. Emily Dickinson is most liberated writing and defending a poetry that does not soothe. “All the best verses are dubious,” she says to an uncomprehending aunt, with the authority of a Supreme Court justice. The profoundest instance of grief in Children is a shot of young Tucker’s mom sobbing, after two minutes of the camera regarding her, on a bus. There is no why; the film has patiently laid bare the why.
Finally, as much as I appreciated Davies’ productivity in the last decade — his is a slender filmography — I also whooped at how funny a scriptwriter he had become. A Quiet Passion was the breakthrough, but with Benediction it’s as if Davies gobbled Hecht-MacArthur and Joseph Mankiewicz along with Wilde and Orton: wit as sabre and shield. Imagine had Davies made a straight-up comedy.
The wonder of how his art developed, despite his period in the wilderness, is that by 2022 he could have essayed any genre; going from Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes to Benediction isn’t an evolution but a fulfillment. Such was his mastery. It did not take his death for many of us to acknowledge Terence Davies as one of the greatest living directors; but for an artist who may or may not have sought the shadows, who was perfected as an outsider and dwelt among the marginalized, he may have regarded our acceptance of lesser filmmakers as our own kind of purgatorial fire.
Humanizing The Vacuum 