Touches You

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This is billed as a documentary about post WWII Liverpool, but it is primarily autobiographical musings from director Davies who grew up in Liverpool in the 1950s. He has stitched together here archival footage, newsreels, amateur video, music, narration, quotes, and his own cinematic work to form an affecting whole. The movie has a melancholy cast to it, thinking of how time erases places and people. Davies comments, "But where, oh, where are you, the Liverpool I knew and loved? Where have you gone without me? And now I am an alien in my own land." The images presented from the early times make life look difficult, but there is an authenticity to them. This was encapsulated for me in Davies' comment about sports being played at a time before the athletes punched the air in victory.Davies has little truck with the public housing towers populating the City, commenting on municipal architecture as being dispiriting, illustrating "the British genius for evoking the dismal." He has strong opinions, often dished out as cynicism with a touch of humor. He refers to the British royalty of the time as the Betty Windsor show and Elizabeth and her husband as Betty and Phil. He refers to a Cardinal's new robes as the Vatican's answer to Schiaparelli. The Catholic Church comes in for some heavy criticism, in no small part because of the misery its position on homosexuality caused him. He came to view his time spent in prayer (until his knees bled he says) as wasted, proclaiming himself to be a born again atheist.Davies has real genius for matching music with image, often for ironic effect. The score ranges from popular hits, like The Spinners version of "Dirty Old Town" and the Hollies version of "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother," to the haunting choral piece "Privagheati si va rugati" by Branesti, the lush "Concertino for Guitar" by Bacarisse, and Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. The musical accompaniment is what raises this film above the ordinary--if someone does not appreciate that, then he will probably not much appreciate the film.Much of the film is in black and white and rather downbeat. However, early on there are scenes of current Liverpool buildings filmed in color that use inspiring camera work, together with Handel's Water music, to create a positive image. The final scenes depict some of the stately statuary and majestic architecture of the City. The penultimate scene of the City skyline at the base of a rainbow, appropriately accompanied by Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, has the film ending on a somewhat upbeat note.Davies intersperses quotes from famous people along the way, some of which he credits, but many he does not, like quotes from T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson. I was left wondering what was original with Davies. He has a good voice and narrates effectively.Describing this film in words does disservice to it, it is like describing what a poem is about rather than experiencing the poem for yourself.

I'm usually a patient viewer who has no problem with films in which nothing much happen. In this case, however, I was expecting a more traditional memoir in which the director tells a personal story. What I got was a series of images and music (classical and vintage popular songs) interspersed with a sparse narration of quotes, anecdotes, and philosophical ramblings.It's supposed to be a lyrical visual poem evoking the director's repressed homosexual youth in an industrial hell. To me, however, it was just a bunch of random images screaming "Look here. This is Art! ART!" I guess that one man's masterpiece is another man's boring, self-indulgent, pretentious twaddle.

I'm not from Liverpool, Scots actually, but have lived alongside it for forty years and it is one of the most fascinating cities architecturally, politically, socially and historically that one can come across. Even today its image and the mere mention of the name Liverpool can split the UK into two opposing factions. It has provided this country with some of the best (and some of the worst!) politicians, singers,poets, musicians, writers, statesmen, sportsmen and women, comedians, medicos, actors...you name it! It also had the blight of some of the worst housing, past and modern. It's had to put up with the blinkered meddling of inner-city planners since the fifties trying to rip the heart out of this jewel of a city. Fortunately some 'good men and true' had the vision and foresight from the 70's onwards to put the brakes on some of the excesses. But unforgivably, those inner-city planners took Scottie Road to the knackers yard instead of putting it out to stud.Terence Davies casts a weary and at times tearful eye over the broad expanse of the city that shaped him. His homosexuality and the trauma that his deep catholic upbringing imposed on him made him a cynic. But that is not a bad thing. Cynicism is part of all of us and Davies imbibes his cynicism with mistrust and love and affection for a city that is in his marrow. Like the Scots, all true Liverpudlians, where e're they travel, are products of their upbringing and are never ashamed to admit it. Watch this film with the sound off and it merely becomes a travelogue of the best and worst of this place. Watch and listen to Davies's commentary though, and the film takes on a vibrancy that fairly pulsates. Liverpool, through this film, becomes a city that breeds high blood pressure. For every beautiful building there is a slum, for every shopping mall there is a 'Bluecoat Chambers', for every wino begging on the subway there is a wisecracking Scouser trying to sell you something on the open-air markets, for every tragedy there is a joyous moment, for every factory that closes there is an entrepreneur starting up. This polyglot of a city breathes..and it breathes life into its people. Walk down some of the old original cobbled alleys off Dale Street or Whitechapel (how did the planners miss them!!) and you can hear this city despairingly whisper into your ear.."Don't forget me!" Davies captures the city and its contradictions and does it beautifully through his careful choice of film and especially through his words. For him it's a love affair and like all such things there is hurt, despair, complacency, anger and moments of pure joy. He can hate his city with a vengeance but it flows through his veins. He knows it and he knows he'll never escape from it. This is HIS Valentines card to HIS city and he has signed his name on it. For the rest of us, this is Liverpool drawn on a wide canvas but in such sharp detail that it needs more than one viewing. Highly recommended.

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}