Film

Of Time and the City is not merely an elegy for the Liverpool of Davies’s childhood; it’s an elegy for a good classical education in literature and music. While found footage and photographs of the impoverished but strangely lovely Liverpool of the 1950s fill the screen, Davies narrates in rich sepulchral tones with quotations from A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, John Keats, the Bible and probably a dozen other sources. The score makes nods to Davies’s self-described passion for Mahler but also throws in some Britpop of the pre-Beatles era. We see images of poor children wandering the streets, women working at industrial laundries, hard men tramping home from hard jobs and gorgeous neo-classical architecture gradually giving way to the hideous brute modernism of public-housing blocks.

Your reaction to all this may depend on your own education. If hearing “Good-night, ladies; good-night, sweet ladies; good-night, good-night” immediately conjures not just Hamlet but also “The Waste Land,” you might find Davies’s mix of mourning and raging quite moving. If you can’t recall whether Keats is the English romantic poet who died young or the Irish poet who wrote about the widening gyre (that would be Yeats, kids), you are more likely to find this allusive work pretentious. First time around, we were leaning toward pretentious, but on second viewing it worked its magic.