| Avenue Pictures | Release Date: September 11, 1988 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
19
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Terence Davies' mesmerizing memory film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, becomes its own kind of poetry: taut, referential, inward, brilliant. Although it is set among the unremarkable flats of Liverpool, the place is stamped by Davies' profoundly original vision and sounds; its framing is painterly and deliberate. And just as you think you have its moves all doped out, a scene of such shocking beauty flashes before you that it takes your breath away.
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This combination of intimacy and remove — the startling emotional jolt of seeing a family in mourning stare toward you in silence, an image of the felled patriarch hanging on the wall behind them — characterizes Davies’s enthralling thirty-year-old debut feature, an autobiographically informed but hardly event-reliant memory piece.
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An idiosyncratic masterpiece and one of the few films in history that gloriously earns the appellation Proustian. [25 Sep 1989]
It's a stunningly stylized, fiercely emotional one-of-a-kind film that seals in amber the horrors of a life the director couldn't wait to escape. [18 Sep 1988, p.96]
The film is full of singing, as the characters break into familiar songs at family gatherings or in the local pub. This isn’t a film based on nostalgia, though; its very special qualities stem from the beautiful simplicity of direction, writing and playing, and the accuracy of the incidents depicted.
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Distant Voices, Still Lives is both a personal and social portrait. It often flows without dialogue, eloquently relating a tragic story that words could not describe. [10 Nov 1989, p.13]
Ultimately, Davies' choices have a powerful cumulative effect. In the latter section, he achieves a transporting poignancy of feeling. What he manages to convey are the debilitating contradictions that exist, side by side, within every family; the ways in which families nurture as they destroy, and love and despair act as equal partners.
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I found Davies' rehashed experiences to range from boring to depressing, and felt that the two devices mentioned above were not sufficient to raise it to the level where art transcends experience. [29 Sep 1989, p.3F]
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