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A few thoughts on Terence Davies
We were driving up to Boston for a wedding when I heard Terence Davies died: a slurry of texts, in quick succession. It felt very not real. I went first to Instagram — hadn’t Davies just posted there a few days ago? Didn’t he just tell Nick Newman he was looking forward to maybe going to Jamaica? Surely he was fine, and this was some kind of mistake. Maybe this was like when my dad emailed me that Todd Haimes1 had died.
The post I’d mistaken for a sure sign of life was the Davies account reminding people they could go see The Deep Blue Sea at the Museum of the Moving Image this past weekend. The Deep Blue Sea was the first Davies film I ever saw sometime in late 2011 or early 2012 when I was studying abroad in London. This was a difficult time in my life: I was wayward and lonely and prone to bouts of bad migraines. I credit this time as my gateway into seeing and thinking about film in a more academic sense; for one, I was allowed to take film-related classes at my university abroad. The movies were also a place to go when I didn’t feel like being anywhere or doing anything. I saw everything back then.
Late 2011 and early 2012, if you’ll remember, was also the height of what I will call “Hiddleston fever.” I don’t count myself one of its many, many victims, but it was certainly an unavoidable part of being online. We couldn’t get enough of the skinny guy in Marvel’s Thor who was played a villain role like it was Shakespeare. And then he slayed all of ten minutes of his part in War Horse. Well, good for him! He had a promising future ahead of being trapped in the Disney vault and I do sometimes wish he would sneak out and make a movie with a real person again. I should specify also that when I say I “saw everything” back then, I mean that I also spent long nights in my apartment catching up on everything I’d put off between 2007 and 2011: the early Marvel films, the Hunger Games books, all of the Game of Thrones books, whatever other nonsense I could eat up to make a day pass quicker.
All of which is to say that when I saw The Deep Blue Sea, in a little theater undoubtedly full of Tom Hiddleston stans, my brain full to the brim of some of the most nonsense media enterprises of the past century, I did not feel primed for the Terence Davies experience. I would love to say something like, “and then The Deep Blue Sea blew me away and I never thought about film the same way again!” But it’s not true. I watched the film, which I liked but did not really understand in an emotional way, and I moved on with my life. The movie stuck with me as an interesting curio: a piece undoubtedly for adults, straight-forward and mature, the characters speaking to each other with unembarrassed directness. It was almost like looking at the sun. The dialogue, its hazy glow — this was more than I could take. I suspect I wasn’t alone.
I kept up with Davies’s work as best I could. I saw A Quiet Passion, which baffled me. I skipped Sunset Song until last year. All the while, I tried to get my hands on any and all interviews with him, in part because he was so funny and forthright. I sometimes wonder if the establishment of some artists within an industry occurs because of a natural talent or because people just like them so much. With Davies, despite his struggles for funding, it did seem that people just outright liked him — they liked what he had to say, they liked his sensibilities, they liked what he brought to the often-staid genres of “period piece” and “romance.” He was open about his tastes, what he liked to see. Movies saved his life. You can see for yourself in his astounding The Long Day Closes — the first Davies movie I saw where everything clicked into place.
What I often admired so much about Davies’s work was its lack of interest in over-explanation and rote plotting. These were Romantic, Impressionist films; these were tone poems. They often used literal poems too — that Davies’s final short film features one of his own poems dedicated to the memory of his sister feels a fitting final gesture.
I often felt at arm’s length from Davies’s films, but it took til last year for me to realize that it was my arm, in this case, and not his. His work is inviting and often warm. Angry and tragic, sure, but never without preface of warmth and love. The Long Day Closes is about love as refuge, Sunset Song about the love of land, Benediction about love as punishment. You have to be willing to meet him halfway as you watch his films — to give yourself over to the sentiment, which ought not be confused with sentimentality.
When I saw Benediction last spring, there were maybe only six of us in the theater, and two of those six people were an older couple sitting a few rows ahead of me. They whispered to each other throughout the duration of the film, which was a little distracting but otherwise inoffensive. It helped, probably, that they were ahead of me and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But every few scenes the woman would lean over to the man and seemingly explain what was happening on screen. I mostly found this very moving, either that he was uncertain or confused or incapable of hearing, and that she took the time to transpose the events of the film to him. It is difficult in a Davies film to say “and then, and then…” Really, it is something you have to feel, but in her efforts — simple, direct, kind — I felt as though the pathos of Benediction came through.
Benediction’s ending is pretty brutal: a man on a bench alone, reckoning with all that violence has robbed his peers of, rueing that he is alive when others are not and that he cannot even, as we say now, “make the most of it.” In the fall and winter, when I was writing about the film for Bright Wall/Dark Room, I devoured nearly every interview with Davies I could get my hands on, the cadence and charm of his voice dancing around in my skull as I wrote. About the ending of Benediction, he said: “Peace of mind — resolution — it doesn’t come. But of course, that’s what makes it interesting.” And then he laughed.
I don’t know if my dad thought this was Todd Haynes or what. I still momentarily blacked out.
Me, reads Fran’s line about “being at arms length but then realizing that the arm is your own.” Also me, breaks down crying at how relatable I found that sentence to be🥹🥹🥹
your love of Benediction is what led to me moving Davies up on my list and finally diving into his (phenomenal) movies last year -- thank you for that, and for this!