Distant Voices, Still Lives

1988 Directed by Terence Davies

The second film in Terence Davies's autobiographical series (along with "Trilogy" and "The Long Day Closes") is an impressionistic view of a working-class family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, based on Davies's own family. Through a series of exquisite tableaux Davies creates a deeply affecting photo album of a troubled family wrestling with the complexity of love.

Freda Dowie Pete Postlethwaite Angela Walsh Lorraine Ashbourne Dean Williams Sally Davies Susan Flanagan Nathan Walsh Michael Starke Debi Jones Vincent Maguire Marie Jelliman Antonia Mallen Anne Dyson Jean Boht Chris Darwin Andrew Schofield Pauline Quirke Carl Chase Alan Bird Matthew Long Frances Dell Roy Ford Terry Melia John Thomalla John Carr John Michie Jeanette Moseley Ina Clough

84 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Sally Jane Black 2

What this film neatly does is both revel in and put the lie to nostalgia. Capturing the past through (musical) standards and brief memories, it drifts to and fro between moments of joy and camaraderie and moments of patriarchal dominance and domestic violence in such a way as to capture not just the moments but also the atmosphere of the past. It doesn't look back at the horrors and say that it wasn't all bad; it looks back at the joys and says that it wasn't all good, and yet, it lets both have as much standing as the other.
And then, the film segues seamlessly into the characters' present (which is still deep within our past) and shows the…
Review by Evan Eaton ★★★★★

“Why did you marry him, mum?”
“He was nice. He was a good dancer.”
My grandma was a northern lass. Throughout my childhood she’d tell me wartime stories of how they’d run and hide from the bombs during The Blitz, or how romance was something to be found at the dancehalls, and violence was something to be found in marriage. My grandad was your run-of-the-mill abusive bastard, who made habits of cheating on her frequently and beating her black and blue, his crimes advocated by a society that wasn’t willing to intervene. Distant Voices, Still Lives recalls my imaginings of that time period more than any film I’ve ever experienced, faded memories fused with a nostalgic glow, desecrated by an…
Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★★

Remake of this about my family but instead of sing-alongs it's quoting passages from sitcom episodes.
Review by DallasFrance ★★★★★ 2

This film floored me. A narrative that seems to swirl and float like Davies’ camera, through the unmoored memories of a family’s life. A loving mother, two loving daughters, and a loving son, all at the mercy of a merciless father. The melancholy that permeates even the best of times. All this strength and sadness underscored and elevated by the songs the family sings together in the pub.
The only other Terence Davies film I’ve seen is The Long Day Closes, and it’s beautiful. This film felt different, though. Something about Davies’ camera panning across those singing faces felt transcendent. It’s a feeing I get when I watch films like In the Mood For Love and Ordet. Only film can do this.
Review by iana ★★★★½

with the sepia-like filter, this film feels like flicking through a photo album — it reminded me of when i would look through my grandpa and my dad’s photo slides from the 50s.
terence davies’ films are time machines.
Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

Writer and director Terence Davies’ autobiographical film Distant Voices, Still Lives tends a territory of remarkable harmony of warmth and affection with violence and uncontrolled anger. It's constructed in two halves, connected principally through the managing of an abundance of shattered dreams for the films characters, particularly for the women, and continually arrives home to the symbolic framing device of the family’s front door.
Fortunately, the impoverished environment and the hardships of those battling the conditions in the nineteen forties and fifties of Liverpool are juxtaposed with incredible junctures of charm. The film resembles a collection of snapshots of childhood recollections with an abundance of slow dissolves creating a succession of personal cross-sectional vignettes; in similitude to fading photographs of a former generation.
Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½

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Picked by: Albie Hay, Frank Ritz, Holden Wright, ComicTwerk4Sans, and sciallacooper.
Distant Voices, Still Lives is without story, just heart, and music. It's a poem, a funeral backwards for a family and a place in time. It looks back at the years in the middle, between the war of the 40s and the cultural explosion of the 60s. Here we find the best of times and the worst of times. Tears at weddings, songs in pubs, coins for eyes, very British rain. Distant Voices, Still Lives is about life's ceremonies but it's also about life's endless memories. The old times weren't so good, and the film knows this. Pete Postlethwaite is exceptional as a bad man in…
Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★½

Asif Khan's #3 Film Selection for Edgar
When personally approaching an autobiography, what I respect the most about its author is his/her honesty. As an impressionistic autobiography of Daivies, he captures not only the idealization of the 1940s and 1950s through the representation of the feelings and media influences of an era submerged in war times and the radio days, but also builds a collage that time travels across distinct times to conform a complex present that is still paying the consequences of its past. It is unafraid of exposing the psychological and physical internal domestic conflicts that a family ("his" family, as that of many others) had to go through even at the expense of cognitive dissonance when he…
Review by aleph beth null ★★★★½

accidentally began this with the director's commentary on and for two minutes was transfixed by a sadly non-existent self-annotating film
i am crumpled by the exclusion & embrace this community experiences, manifests, & reinforces through song & songs.
Review by Milez Das ★★★★★ 5

With a melody in the background feeling, story of family and the three siblings and their memories of a domineering father. It sets in the tone, distancing in parts. Mourning of his loss, but as we go back from the eyes of each sibling we gather their lives withing those distant voices that sing, throwing a blanket over a scum their father was. But not for Eileen, who had some fond memories of him as she grieves for him on her weeding day.
There is this feel of reality, that takes you back in time. The nostalgia of those painful memories. You hate the man who is beating his wife, who is dominating his young children. Even his fits on…
Review by Carlos Valladares

My mind is swirling just trying to convey what a primal, haunting achievement Distant Voices, Still Lives is from beginning to end. It makes you feel connected to the world through a paradoxical recognition of how isolated we are from each other. Davies' film is basically an older, wiser man reading to his kids (us) from a brutally personal storybook with the pages shuffled out of order. Broken up into two parts on extremes ends of a spectrum, the first ("Distant Voices") abounds with too many narratives to keep track of, while the second ("Still Lives") has hardly anything going. Both are striking in how stark the director-qua-film paints his world. It very closely approximates how our memories work: no…
Review by jrhovind ★★★★

Undeniably gorgeous, even if it feels to me like Davies is still trying to figure out how to stretch his singular early style to feature length. A claustrophobic chamber drama of memories and open wounds, finding perhaps the ways in which the former, both good and bad, are always ultimately like the latter. The things you can’t shake, paradoxically, are made of the same ephemeral stuff as all the things you wish you could hold onto but can never get back again. “I was wrong, lad.” “Okay, dad. Okay.” Both a haunting film and a haunted one, its pub songs and golden-age standards like the incantations with which Davies’ sad Liverpudlians raise and honor their dead; and in the unforgettable…

Recent reviews

Review by Till Sanden

Arrow-Player
Review by Matthew Mulcahy ★★★★

I once briefly met Terence Davies outside a screening of Sunset Song he was about to introduce at the cinema where I worked at the time. I can't remember much other than how patient he was with listening to someone as clueless as teenage me which makes total sense given how only someone that humanist could've made something like this. I can't think of another film that captures the complexity of interpersonal relationships as beautifully yet simplistically as this, let alone the malleability of time and memories. Easily my favourite Pete Postlethwaite performance. It does require a certain amount of patience that I worried might dissipate once it moved into its second half but by that point I was immersed enough in the adult lives of the characters to remain engaged throughout.
Review by smallclone ★★★

This was almost a musical. It plays out like a version of Terrence Davies' memories as songs and arguments. Told in 2 distinct halves it feels very personal and although all the music did become a bit too much at one point, it is clear to see what the director was aiming for. Voted as the 3rd best British film of all time by 150 critics in 2011 - it's a good film but not the masterpiece some have made it out to be.
Review by HeatherShannon ★★★★

So much singing! So much misery!
Review by Camila ★★★★★

“There’s a man, going ‘round taking names... Death is that man taking names”
<3
Review by Roberta

BIZARRE
and the bitches who kept singing omfg
Review by J MK ★★★★½

there’s a reason reviewers often use the word ‘gritty’ when describing ‘working class’ films. ‘grit’ is a character trait denoting perseverance of the individual through hardship. this film shows how dispossessed people in poverty feel, not just economically, but emotionally too, and yet they sing & crack jokes - a triumph of the human spirit.
there is a scene when Eileen cries I miss my dad mere minutes after getting married. we learn that her father was abusive and violent, showing how complex our feelings can be for those that have failed us.
That's all we need, you singing. As if life isn't purgatory enough without that.
despite frequent acapella overtures and some decent patter, there is a pervasive sadness that lingers throughout; in the pub, in the family home, at the funeral home. a strange clash of major & minor: ghostworthy nostalgia.
Review by Evan Eaton ★★★★★

“Why did you marry him, mum?”
“He was nice. He was a good dancer.”
My grandma was a northern lass. Throughout my childhood she’d tell me wartime stories of how they’d run and hide from the bombs during The Blitz, or how romance was something to be found at the dancehalls, and violence was something to be found in marriage. My grandad was your run-of-the-mill abusive bastard, who made habits of cheating on her frequently and beating her black and blue, his crimes advocated by a society that wasn’t willing to intervene. Distant Voices, Still Lives recalls my imaginings of that time period more than any film I’ve ever experienced, faded memories fused with a nostalgic glow, desecrated by an…
Review by Spyros

Εάν νομίζετε ότι έχετε κατάθλιψη αλλά δεν είστε και σίγουροι, δεν θα έχετε καμία αμφιβολία μετά από αυτή την ταινία...
Review by Christopher Lam ★★★★

A kaleidoscopic memory play that looks like photos in motion. Very cool filmmaking process. The soundtrack also provides emotional support.
Review by nolanjaku ★★★½

the most rooted in reality a musical has ever been
Review by lauren *:･ﾟ✧ ★★★★★

an intricately-structured narrative, about memory, melancholy, nostalgia, trauma and the inability to untwine the past from the present, communicated through beautifully impressionistic visuals, the geographies of the family home and the pub, and song. one of those films you finish and just want to watch again immediately