Liverpool in 1955, and young Bud (Leigh McCormack) stays with his family in their tenement house, a peaceful existence now that his father has died. He lives for the cinema, and needles his mother (Marjorie Yates) for enough money to visit the local picture palace, so sometimes she relents in her kindhearted way, knowing how much going to see the stars of the silver screen means to him. This year Bud will be leaving his primary school to graduate to the secondary, but even the thought of being bullied is not enough to put him off his favourite things: Jesus Christ and the movies.
Writer and director Terence Davies followed up his bleaker Distant Voices, Still Lives with another tribute to his childhood, only where the previous film had depicted the cruelties of living with a violent parent, here it was as if a storm had lifted and the boy who represented him was able to enjoy his youth at last. Indeed, the whole film is shot in a hazy nostalgia, not even opting to present any kind of story, simply linking various memories that you have to take on trust are in some kind of order the way Davies saw them. Naturally, this kind of thing divides audiences between those who can wallow in its studied warmth and those who are bored out of their minds.
If you can adjust to the pace, the lack of narrative and the glimpses of personality that offer the only character, then The Long Day Closes can cast a spell over you, with its atmosphere of a dream summoned many years after the fact. The trouble is that Bud is not much of a guide through this world, leaving us to grasp at the bright spots of vividness when you can see that here was a person who made an impression on the young Davies, whether it was through their humour or their intimidation or simply the way they started singing once. The boy reacts to all of these things in exactly the same way, if it is a reaction, leaving a blank space where most films would have their protagonist.
The events - it's not really a plot - are carried over a year-long period from when Davies was eleven, so that gets to take in Bonfire Night, Christmas, New Year's Eve, and the like, all of which trigger the filmmaker's reminiscences. You can understand why he might rhapsodise over these memorable nights, when everything seemed right with the world, but he appears to wear the same rose tinted spectacles for when he recalls being bullied at school, or when he suffered headlice and had to get a treatment, not the kind of thing most viewers would share a pleasant attitude towards. Yet everything that comes under the remit of the film has this "good old days" approach.
Perhaps it is more constructive to watch The Long Day Closes as a mood piece, where you can allow all these memories to wash over you, from the local characters who popped in to see Bud's mother to cheer her up to the religious ecstasies of praying in church and knowing that God is up there in Heaven, looking down on you and judging you, so that you don't want to upset him. The parallels between going to church and going to the cinema are plainly delineated through comparable imagery, and even going to school too: anywhere people gathered for a communal experience is observed in a similar manner. It might help to know a bit about Davies' background to truly appreciate this, but its does evoke a sense of time and place through careful reconstruction, almost a fugue of what sticks in its creator's mind, with appropriate clips from films and songs on the soundtrack, acknowledging how powerful such entertainment can be for bringing it all back.
