#82: Distant Voices, Still Lives
Part of the Top 150 Films series
Capturing mid-century Liverpool through musical standards and brief memories, Distant Voices, Still Lives drifts to and fro between moments of joy and camaraderie and those of patriarchal dominance and domestic violence in such a way as to capture 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. However, each impression has equal weighting in the film. More than most other filmmakers, Davies (of this period) understands that contradictions are what drive art and life. Distant Voices is at once bombastic and restrained, political and poetic, mysterious and specific, all in ways that seem impossible, and are, in fact, impossible to describe. These contradictions seem less like impossibilities and more like natural and necessary extensions of each other. The film is the greatest argument for and against nostalgia.
