Distant Voices, Still Lives sets out very deliberately to be painterly, observant, episodic and poetic. What is is, however, is haughty, stiff, self-conscious and uninvolving.
Growing up working class, I remember the singing, the drinking and smoking, and the fights round the kitchen table. The singing wasn't as professional, sober or choreographed as this. The drinking was messier, the smoking unhealthier (no one in this film has a smoker's cough, they all look like 'cool' smokers), and the fights and violence were a lot more visceral and furious. At one point the mother here is covered in bruises head to toe. Domestic violence was awful and for some victims relentless, but mostly (sometimes willfully) hidden from view. This film overplays it. As it does with the constant singing, which just becomes annoying.
I can appreciate the cinematography even if it does draw too much attention to itself, and the careful depiction of period detail. What I cannot accept is the wooden dialogue sequences, and the use of a nostalgia filter in a non-ironic way. The same themes have been covered in Once Were Warriors, Nil By Mouth, East is East, Tyrannosaur... Those films deal with the material in a much more vivid, affecting manner. There is not, of course, only one way to approach these subjects. But the approach taken by Distant Voices, Still Lives does not work.
Just because a film sets out very deliberately to be art cinema does not mean that it is. Britain's past is mis-represented in both folklore and aesthetic terms in this turgid outing.
Growing up working class, I remember the singing, the drinking and smoking, and the fights round the kitchen table. The singing wasn't as professional, sober or choreographed as this. The drinking was messier, the smoking unhealthier (no one in this film has a smoker's cough, they all look like 'cool' smokers), and the fights and violence were a lot more visceral and furious. At one point the mother here is covered in bruises head to toe. Domestic violence was awful and for some victims relentless, but mostly (sometimes willfully) hidden from view. This film overplays it. As it does with the constant singing, which just becomes annoying.
I can appreciate the cinematography even if it does draw too much attention to itself, and the careful depiction of period detail. What I cannot accept is the wooden dialogue sequences, and the use of a nostalgia filter in a non-ironic way. The same themes have been covered in Once Were Warriors, Nil By Mouth, East is East, Tyrannosaur... Those films deal with the material in a much more vivid, affecting manner. There is not, of course, only one way to approach these subjects. But the approach taken by Distant Voices, Still Lives does not work.
Just because a film sets out very deliberately to be art cinema does not mean that it is. Britain's past is mis-represented in both folklore and aesthetic terms in this turgid outing.