Terence Davies's followup to his autobiographical Distant Voices, Still Lives. Although every bit as severely stylized, it is not so much the mere repetition of the earlier film as the absolute perfection of it. The monstrous father is now well out of the picture, and there's no sizable antagonist to take his place, only a stern schoolmaster ("I'm Mr. Nicholls. You play ball with me, and I'll play ball with you"), an officious school nurse on the hunt for head lice ("What nasty little creatures you little boys are!"), and the occasional bully, taunter, and tormentor among the classmates. Peripheral figures, all. Lacking a legitimate boogeyman, the movie might sound in summary as if it could not have much of a grip, composed as it is of random and representative and undramatic slices of life, fragments, moments, memories, set down in achingly sensuous detail. Do all these moments, all these memories, add up to anything? They do. The "story" of the movie, if you must have one, is the movie itself. It's a movie about transformation — about the shaping and framing and processing of experience. This goes on both in the present tense (the re-creation, the reshaping, of past events on screen) and in the past (the shaping of events, even as they happen, by the prepubescent hero and the assorted influences on him). The most concise statement of the theme comes near the end, almost as a final summation, in the form of an overhead, space-dissolving tracking shot that erects a bridge between the movie house, the church, and the school, and correspondingly sets up an equation between art and religion and education. It's all part of life; it's all a kind of art; it's all transforming/transformed; it's all shaping/shaped. Leigh McCormack, Marjorie Yates. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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