The Long Day Closes

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Audience Member A young Britain boy is trying to make his way through the world directed by Terence Davies In the mid-1950s Bud is lonely and quiet but finds much solace sitting in rapture at the local movie theater He watches towering and iconic figures on screen Bud is given the strength to go through every day as he deals with his oppressive school environment to his burgeoning homosexuality A lot of this ends up being a drag to watch There's so many long establishing shots without that many edits The main character ends up being so uninteresting Maybe more out if this works fantasy sequences wouldve helped liven things up The story ends up being very meandering Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 05/29/23 Full Review Audience Member Give it a 3-star for its music, otherwise 2-star for its story. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/16/23 Full Review Audience Member Meticulously crafted with each sequence suffused with a distinctive kind of light, often muted or mediated through the rain; on the soundtrack, there are snippets of film dialogue or songs and unknown noises transposed over the more diegetic sounds. This is director Terence Davies' personal reverie, bespeaking of a lonely childhood, brightened occasionally by the cinema and by family bonds with preoccupied older siblings and a widowed mum. The stillness of the moments is often broken by singing, sometimes low and distant and personal, and occasionally religious or from the heart, collectively, as in Davies' previous film (Distant Voices, Still Lives; 1988). But the overall feeling is cold, not warmly nostalgic, but chilly and apart -- the staged and constructed nature of the shots adds to this sense of detachment. There is often pain and torment, from stern schoolmasters and schoolyard bullies - and friends who carelessly exclude. Yet, the film is still wondrous, a series of high-culture poetic moments with low-culture British tenement life as their ingredients (alongside audio from The Magnificent Ambersons, Great Expectations, Meet Me in St. Louis, and the Ealing Comedies as clues to decipher or totems to worship). Almost too personal to share, if it weren't for its deeper common humanity. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/04/23 Full Review Audience Member I may not have grown up in Liverpool in the 1950s but yeah, this is exactly what it feels like to be a sad lonely gay kid from a very Catholic family who takes solace in movies. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/13/23 Full Review Audience Member http://filmreviewsnsuch.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-long-day-closes.html Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/25/23 Full Review Audience Member I'm absolutely furious that no-one ever thought to inform me that this movie existed. I can't believe I was robbed of this experience for so long. Being gay and loving film isn't always easy. It's very rare for a movie to address homosexual themes at all, and even rarer for one to do so without drawing connections between sexuality and grim, depressive suppression, physical abuse, or subtly suggesting moral "corruption". It's still even rarer for a film to make the gay experience the center of focus while doing so in an artful, meaningful way; in that respect, I've never found anything that comes close to achieving what The Long Day Closes does in its brief 85 minutes. Dreamily conveying the life of 11 year old Bud through musical montage and compellingly rendered family drama, Davies constructs an absolutely gorgeous period setting to convey the subtle struggles of a shy, film-obsessed gay boy (a story very clearly autobiographical given the nature of his own childhood). He builds a slice of Bud's life as one would recall a memory, pausing on warm moments and hurriedly acknowledging the painful ones, and despite the lack of any real drama, we're given a very clear trajectory of Bud's maturation, his inner-turmoil brought on by the presence of oppressive religious constructs, and his ultimate self-acceptance. It's an indescribable experience for someone who's endured similar inner-struggles, and the final moments should be considered some of the most moving in the history of cinema. As someone who's cried a only handful of times since adolescence, the fact that The Long Day Closes was able to wring sobs out of me (entirely because I couldn't stand for it to end) is genuinely amazing. It's a masterpiece, the best gay film ever made, and undeniably one of the greatest, subtlest piece of filmmaking ever produced. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/10/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Long Day Closes

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