Family Ties

By RICHARD CORLISS

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES

Directed and Written by Terence Davies

Screen dreams are strangest and strongest when they hit close to home. In Terence Davies' searing memoir of his working-class family in Liverpool 30 and 40 years ago, mystery resides in the vision of his mother, magically poised on the hall sill, washing the outside windows ("Don't fall, Mom. Please don't fall"). Laughter erupts from three colleens parodying a Nat King Cole hit ("They tried to sell us egg foo yung"). The recollected terror of a vicious father can be tempered by his early death. The daughter who vowed, "If I ever get a gun, I'll blow your bleedin' brains out," will sob on her wedding day, "I want me dad!"

This is nostalgia with the blinkers off. It understands that in family life everything is complicated, even a grown child's hatred for the ogre who sired him. The father here (Pete Postlethwaite) is a man capable of tenderness but more comfortable as the patriarchal tyrant. He refuses to share a drink with his son (Dean Williams) or a farewell with his daughter Eileen (Angela Walsh). He beats daughter Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne) for wanting to go to a dance, and flogs his wife (Freda Dowie), stifling even her sobs with barked threats to "Shut up!" It is a brutality he never troubles to understand, and which his family can only absorb like welts.

How do these people face or evade the dour cliches of dead-end domesticity? By expressing their feelings through the poetry of pop songs. Like Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, which also knew how potent cheap music is, Davies' film is laced with dozens of postwar tunes to counterpoint or underline the narrative. In the pub where everyone stops by "just to wet the baby's head," Eileen's pal Micky (Debi Jones) sings an effervescent Buttons and Bows, and Eileen pours her own seething frustration into a passionate rendition of I Wanna Be Around to Pick Up the Pieces. The musky wisp of Ella Fitzgerald's Taking a Chance on Love helps explain the mother's fatalistic refusal to leave her man. With its irresistible airs in eerily ironic settings, Distant Voices, Still Lives is the first great sing-along horror movie.

Davies, who made the film in two parts (one shot in 1985, the other in 1987), knows too that memory shuffles chronology like a deck of dog-eared cards on a rainy afternoon. His film is arranged as a series of vignettes, in which life's everyday epiphanies crowd out the sanctified rituals of birth, marriage and death. Eileen and her husband share a meal whose chill is punctuated only by their separate smiles at a radio comedian. Mother falls asleep with memories in her ear: Dad rasping for her to come to him, her young children answering the question "How much do you love me?" with an eager "A pound of sugar!" Davies recalls all these sights and sounds -- so horrifying, so beautiful -- and, with his unflinching style, turns anecdote into artistry. The distant voices still live.