This review was commissioned by Brock Jahnke over on my Ko-fi account.
Music sets the mood for us here. The characters that populate Terrence Davies’ portrait of early 20th century Liverpool live their lives in song, from moody Catholic hymns, jaunty party standards, and burgeoning pop radio hits. Davies’ score comes to us in both diegetic and non-diegetic ways. Oftentimes, the cast sing to while the time away whether it be in celebratory unison with the family or lost in a lonesome routine of household work. Davies frames the actors to fill the frame, looking us dead on, giving the impression that they’re singing to us, perhaps expecting us to join in on the song. But other times, the soundtrack sets the mood in ways both sincere (Jessye Norman’s melancholic rendition of “There’s a Man Goin’ Round Takin’ Names) and ironic (“Taking a Chance on Love” to score a moment of domestic abuse).
The emphasis on music and disembodied dialogue gets established immediately from the first scene. Nell (Freda Dowie) calls up the stairs of her townhouse to bring her three children down to breakfast. We never see the children come running down, but we here the footsteps and the greetings at the table. It’s as effective an establishing moment as I’ve ever seen, bringing us into the mood and world that Davies asks us to sink into. It’s one of memory, leaping from moment to moment, associative but vivid. The film takes us from the wedding celebration of Eileen (Angela Walsh) to the death of abusive family patriarch Tommy (Pete Postlethwaite) and down multiple digressions and memories.
In doing so, Davies creates a patchwork portrait of working class life. Perhaps most impressively, he does it without the sort of rose-tinted nostalgia that one often gets from artists looking back at their past. What Davies presents here is far more complex and contradictory, and all the more real for it as well. The Davies family in the picture lives a simple life, often torn between the innocent pleasures of childhood and the vicious violence inflicted upon them by their father. Pete Postlethewaite puts in a wonderful performance here as Tommy, a character that feels fully realized instead of being just the haunting memory looming over the picture. Few sequences sum this up better than one set during Christmas morning. At night, he’s content and grateful watching over his sleeping children and hanging makeshift stockings stuffed with presents on their bed post, and by the morning, he’s in what seems to be an unprompted rage destroying the family table setting.
On his deathbed, Tommy remains something of a mystery and contradiction. His last words to son Tony (Dean Williams) are simply, “I was wrong.”
Even Tommy gets shown to us in music. When his long suffering wife Nell is asked why she ever married him, one of her main reasons is that “he was a good dancer.” When he’s not in a seething rage, Tommy’s seen brushing a family horse–families had horses then, I suppose–and singing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” The children spy on him from overhead in the stables, stealing a glance of their father in a peaceful, vulnerable moment.
In the film’s Liverpool, music is an escape. When the family rushes into a bomb shelter during the war, Eileen’s singing is the only thing to distract the gathered strangers from the sound of warfare overhead. Into adulthood, at Eileen’s wedding, when an argument arises over a friend’s marital troubles, she’s meant to soothe the atmosphere in the room with another song. The Davies family and the people around them sing to feel, but also to soothe the pain that surrounds them on every side.
It’s the only constant in the harsh world they live in–shown to us in earthy brown tones somewhere between bleak and wistful. The film beautifully manages the shifts in tone though, skillfully bringing us to crushing lows and right back up to easy, amiable laughter. If anything, the shifting tone speaks to the emotional range that all these families live in constantly, the rhythm of private worries set against public merriment. The Davies family all handle their performances her brilliantly, almost always subtle and all the more moving for it. They’re given a great helping hand by the supporting cast though. Debi Jones deserves a shout here as something of a comic relief character, Micky, brash and hilarious in every scene.
A movie like this is catnip to someone like me, a known Aftersun devotee. It’s a gentle film, in its own way, but not a coddling one. There’s truth there in the memory, and it’s bright and filled with filling. Semi-autobiographical and drawn from his own childhood experience, there’s a lyrical quality to it all. Terrence Davies sings us a song from his childhood, and it’s a lovely one to behold.
Rating (Letterboxd scale): ****
