Getting Close to ‘Distant Voices’ : Liverpudlian Davies put a lot of his working-class upbringing into the film

Terence Davies’ “Distant Voices, Still Lives” is an oddly constructed, beautiful film about Liverpool in the ‘40s and ‘50s, with scenes that can make you weep. A family gathers to mourn their dead father: a raging bully who tyrannized them all. Memories slide into other memories: the battered mother quietly doing her chores with wounds on her arms, the violent husband howling in the last agonies of cancer. The children revolt, argue, marry--and, endlessly, gather for parties and sing-a-longs. Music is the leitmotiv of the film: music and the suffering it eases or transcends.

“Distant Voices”--now playing its sole U.S. engagement at the Goldwyn Pavilion--has been a huge critical hit at film festivals around the world. Yet, it’s probably not the innate pathos that effects audiences--but the quiet, unhysterical manner--the feeling of absolute veracity--in which Davies relates it.

There’s an easy explanation for feeling that the film’s incidents may have actually happened. And they actually did.

“When my mother saw the film,” Davies says, “What she said was: ‘He’s told the truth.’ Which I have.”

“I never thought it would have this kind of response. I made it for me, as a homage to my family and to a way of life gone by. That was it: very, very modest.”

Davies, who grew up in the poverty and psychological torment he describes in “Distant Lives,” is a spry, small, wittily eloquent man with an elfin grin and searching, very expressive eyes. One of the remarkable things about him is the way the lively enthusiasm of his talk prevents his subjects from seeming sordid or depressing.

“My mother was perhaps the most important relationship of my life,” he says, with a kind of “damn-Freud-full-speed-ahead” bravado. “I do adore her more than anything on this earth; I really do.”

But his father: a Liverpudlian odd-job specialist, whose picture is actually on the wall in several scenes? “It was sort of not a relationship. He died when I was 7, and I was just frightened of him all the time. He was so violent, so permanently enraged . . . He seemed to me anyway--thinking back on it, now--almost psychotic.

“Perhaps not mentally psychotic--but perhaps a psychosis of the soul. I don’t know . . . Someone said in an review: he was a man driven mad by parenthood. Perhaps, because he had an awful life, it scarred him emotionally--and instead of saying, ‘Well, I’ll make it better for my kids,’ his attitude was, ‘Well, I had it rough; there’s no reason why you should have it easy.’ ”

In his film, the father shows flashes of unexpected sympathy. Yet, Davies’ dad once drove his mother to a suicide attempt so weird it probably couldn’t have been re-created believably. “She’d gone upstairs to the bedroom . . . He came after her. And she said, ‘I just felt that I couldn’t take any more.’ So she opened the window when my father came--and she leaned out, with my brother, only a baby, in her arms, and jumped. A soldier was walking past just then and caught them both!”

Davies said he came up with the film’s peculiar structure--the fractured chronology, the still tableaux that suggest a photo album--as a way of re-creating experiences that live in his memory.

“It’s a film of memories,” he says. “And memory doesn’t work in a linear way; it’s cyclical. It constantly comes back on itself. Those memories which are not mine, they were told to me when I was a child, I seemed to absorb them, as my own memories, almost like osmosis, I suppose . . . But they were so vivid. They were told so vividly that they became part of my memory . . . And because of the way memory works--You get flashes of memory and you get little vignettes . . . But what you get most of all is the quintessence of an experience, refined down to its bare essentials. That’s what makes memory powerful.”

Davies reflects a different Liverpudlian culture than we’re used to. He worked for a dozen years across the street from the legendary dance hall, “The Cavern,” yet never visited it. (“I must be the only person in either hemisphere who doesn’t love the Beatles,” he remarks, jokingly.) For him--and his family--the preferred entertainment was British radio and earlier American-style music: Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day--and, especially, the Golden Age Hollywood musical.

“My first movie actually, was, at 7, ‘Singing in the Rain’--which is why (in ‘Distant Voices’) the umbrellas are outside with the rain on them. That’s my little homage to Gene Kelly.

“It was in one of those old cinemas which had a completely brown interior,” he continues. “And I remember everything vividly, (especially) the title number. I had never seen anything so magical in all my life! And I felt--and I still feel--that America was like that. America was the land of magic. Everyone was good-looking; they all had wrap-around teeth. They all had cars, and they lived in these fabulous houses with verandas. I mean, we believed that America was like that. And we were living in slums in Liverpool, and you didn’t come out of those films thinking ‘We’re living in slums.’ You just came out thinking: ‘Isn’t America fabulous !’ “When grimier, grittier versions of America were shown in movies like ‘Marty’ or ‘On the Waterfront,’ our response was, ‘No. It’s really like ‘Young at Heart.’ I know it is! It’s a lie.’ And the very first time I came to America, I went to Chicago. I was mugged.”

His father’s death didn’t release Davies from the cycle of brutality and poverty. Smaller than his schoolmates, Davies says he was beaten continually from the time he was 11 until he was about 15. Paradoxically, he thinks tenacity that he may have inherited from his father helped him through it. “When I got beaten up every day, for four years, I didn’t tell anyone. And the one thing I would not do is cry. I would not do it. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. And that, I suppose, is quite tenacious.”

That tenacity also helped him through decades poured into both his films--”Distant Voices, Still Lives” and his autobiographical trilogy (“Children,” “Madonna and Child” and “Death and Transfiguration”). “I suppose when I set my mind to something, I’ll do it. I didn’t realize it at the time; I just felt a mad passion to make these films.”

Of the Trilogy: “It’s the story of a man from the age of 14 to when he dies in a geriatric ward, all alone, a practicing Catholic and a non-practicing homosexual. That spiritual tension crucifies him. It was--I thought at the time--a catharsis just for me.”

Both films, seemingly modest, earned what seems to Davies astonishing acceptance among the world’s critics. He won a total of 17 awards at major film festivals, 11 alone for “Distant Voices.” His family backed him up as well, even after he revealed himself as gay.

“The peculiar thing about working-class families is that . . . if anyone actually said anything to me about being gay--they’d literally close ranks. They really would. Even the ones who I’m less close to, who are more equivocal about my sexuality, wouldn’t let anyone intimidate me or do anything to me.”

It is in himself that Davies says he finds some non-acceptance. He says he feels it would have been more important to be a father--a good one--than to have made his films. And he finds, even today, a certain cruelty in the gay world.

“I really do. It seems to me based far too much on being exceptionally good-looking and young,” he says. “They’re not interested in whether you’ve got a fine mind or a good soul or nice hands . . . And so one tends to live a life of not only celibacy, but a great deal of loneliness. I try not to let it embitter me; I don’t want to become bitter.”

Davies’ major artistic influences are also his solaces--the literature of T. S. Eliot, the drama of Anton Chekhov. And in movies, a long list, beginning with the great Hollywood musicals and the movies of Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir and Carl Dreyer, the neo-realist films of De Sica and Visconti, neglected American works such as the Charles Laughton-James Agee “Night of the Hunter,” and silent films such as Griffith’s “Intolerance” and Von Stroheim’s towering social drama “Greed.”

For many good reasons, “Distant Voices” may be remembered for its choice of music, and Davies acknowledges a lot of music influence on him: particularly the works of Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner and Dimitri Shostakovich.

“I couldn’t get through life, I think, without those three composers,” he says. “Particularly the (unfinished) 10th symphony of Mahler--and the late string quartets and 10th symphony of Shostakovich . . . What I think I respond to most in Shostakovich--and what my film tries to do, in many, many ways--is that seeming hopelessness: that life has been a complete waste of time, and it’s full of suffering . . . And yet, despite that, he can look into the abyss and say: ‘Yet it is pointless, it’s full of suffering; it is very, very hard. And the happiness is fleeting.

“But it is worth it.

“I think that really takes immense courage . . . to look at life in that way, with a steady gaze, and say: It was worth it, nonetheless.”