Film

Small children play on a makeshift swing; dogs sniff around amiably. Mothers drape the day’s laundry from window lines. A Mahler choral symphony hums on the soundtrack. This is England—more specifically director Terence Davies’s vision of Liverpool, his slate-gray hometown, dull even when it’s shot in color. Davies has never made a doc before, but if you’ve ever tried his autobiographical dramas, particularly 1992’s extraordinary The Long Day Closes, you’re aware that rhapsodic melancholia is a register he knows well. You won’t gain a smidge of new historical insight from Of Time and the City, like you do from Guy Maddin’s sneakily probing My Winnipeg, but as a collection of post-WWII archival footage coupled with keen musical choices (e.g., the Spinners’ “Dirty Old Town”), this is lovely stuff.

Alas, there’s a narrator ruining the experience—bitching, moaning, haterating—and I’m loath to mention that it’s Davies himself. What will happen to his rep if his fans associate the earlier works with this swooningly pretentious whiner? Of course, a man’s opinions are his own. And Davies’s out-and-proud atheism and cheeky antiroyalism (the “Betty Windsor Show,” he calls the monarchy) are very much in keeping with his negative take on Liverpool’s most famous export, the Fab Four, whom he snidely overdubs with his own sarcastic yeah yeah yeahs. It doesn’t take a lot of the director’s sourness before you start suspecting his more poetic passages of condescension. Perhaps working-class Liverpudlians won’t mind having their city called the “anus mundi” by one of their own. But is he truly one of them?