Cannes. Of Time and the City.

"[T]he one truly great movie to emerge so far has been Terence Davies's Of Time and the City [site]; it's not only this writer who considers it some kind of masterpiece."

This writer is Geoff Andrew (Time Out): "Watching the film, you realise that Britain has no other filmmaker to match Davies in terms of his purely cinematic sensibility. Fine as our other far-from-inconsiderable big names are, it's hard to imagine any of them creating sheer filmic poetry as may be found here. Davies's juxtapositions of music and image, especially, are consistently audacious, original and exhilarating, whether the compositions reflect and reinforce each other or whether they make more complex by way of superbly sharp irony."

Updated through 5/22.

"[E]ven though it runs a brief 72 minutes, this documentary memory play about Davies' hometown of Liverpool is so rich with emotion, nostalgia, clarity, and love that it feels epic," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "Davies himself narrates over the inspired onrush of historical and archival footage, and his hoarse, whispered cadences have the urgency of the confessional and the scornful humor of the outsider.... [I]t's easily the most haunting work I've seen at Cannes."

"[T]his is mainly a biography of a place and time," writes Mary Corliss for Time: "of its stately old civic monuments and, later, its soulless estates (an expression, Davies says in the narration, of 'the British genius for creating the dismal'); of its residents' football mania and fondness for radio's corniest comics; of the contrast between postwar rationing and the regal excesses of Queen Elizabeth's coronation ('the Betty Windsor Show')."

"Davies has always been fascinated by both out-of-reach glamour and the banality of everyday life," writes Howard Feinstein in Screen Daily. "Revisiting what he calls 'the happy highways where I went and can not come again,' is obviously cathartic for Davies, even if melancholy seeps through every frame."

Earlier: Frank Cottrell Boyce talks with Davies for the Guardian.

Updates, 5/20: Davies "ranges far and wide through both the city and its history, waxing personal and then political as he lingers at the movies (an early love), pauses in bleak homes and passes through one grim brick-lined Liverpudlian street after another, strewn with litter and busy with children," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Mixing his words with quotations (from Friedrich Engels to Willem de Kooning), pop songs and classical music, he brings the past sensitively to life with black-and-white and color footage of a time long gone, both distant and still."

"Nothing in Cannes has given me as much pleasure as Terence Davies's glorious Of Time and the City," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It is by turns tender, lyrical, angry, shrewd and, above all, funny. This tough, unsentimental film refuses to use cliches and it got enormous, deserved laughs from festival-goers of all nationalities.... I was reminded of Philip Larkin's request that his poems should be read aloud as simply as if giving directions in the street: Davies's poetic cinema has precisely this clarity and force."

Variety's Leslie Felperin finds the film "by turns moving, droll and charming, and niftily assembled, but not necessarily that profound."

"Who's the happiest man in Cannes this week?" asks the Telegraph's David Gritten. "My vote would go to British director Terence Davies, who's walking around the place looking like the cat who got the cream."

Update, 5/21: Online viewing tip. "Director Terence Davies has urged his fellow British film-makers to reject "sub-American nonsense" and create films made in and about the UK instead." The BBC has a clip.

Update, 5/22: "More than anything, it feels like a city symphony film, an update on The Man With the Movie Camera, After Irony," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Davies takes Dziga Vertov as a template, and then takes into account history both personal and social, transmitting both with the dryest of British wit. As far as recent place-based diary film masterpieces go, it's not quite My Winnipeg, but there's some lovely stuff here."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2008 2:19 PM