Metrograph

An exquisite, sensual, and achingly personal work of art from Davies, set in the director’s hometown of Liverpool as remembered from the 1950s of his youth—a drab urban environment where the markers of postwar austerity are everywhere evident, but also an environment where snatches of furtive beauty could be found by those who sought them and where the spirit of fellow feeling among working-class Britons, as embodied by the pub sing-along, offered balm for what might otherwise be an intolerable existence. The authorial surrogate here is young Bud, a movie-mad 12-year-old on the verge of sexual awakening; in one bravura sequence, set to Debbie Reynold’s “Tammy,” Davies unforgettably weaves together the three formative spaces of Bud’s youths, and his own: the church, the classroom, and the cinema.

35mm print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Moving Image Archives.

Distributor: Janus Films