![]() ![]() Cinematographer Sacha Vierny, of Hiroshima Mon Amour renown, was presumably a key player in creating it. There's certainly a Cronenberg-esque element to all this (Crash? Dead Ringers?) Greenaway is equally concerned with the perfectly-composed shot, filling the frame with eye-bending symmetry and idiosyncratic colour co-ordination. An eclectic cast – including Joss Ackland, Frances Barber and Jim Davidson – make their way through what can only be described as an anti-narrative: twin brother zoologists lose their wives in a car crash, then become obsessed with the amputee who killed them, all the while indulging in their passion for filming decaying corpses and watching David Attenborough's Life on Earth. If Davies' work is the cinema of passion, Greenaway's is one of preoccupation, and Zed is a summary of his obsessions: death, sex, light and Dutch golden-age painting. Again, director Peter Greenaway had already made a name for himself (with his first feature The Draughtsman's Contract) when he came to Zed, as he says in a filmed introduction on the BFI DVD, he was determined to do something different. When Distant Voices was rereleased in 2007, Beryl Bainbridge wrote a brilliant appreciation of it and, for what it's worth, is my own five-star review.Ī Zed & Two Noughts, on the other hand, is the product of an entirely different world view. It is an astonishingly poetic treatment of British working-class life – the kind of material that was the staple of kitchen sink and agit-prop cinema, but Davies' sensuous shot-making and beautifully rendered sense of dream-memory couldn't be more different than the Ken Loaches of this world. I think it's fair to say there's nothing else like it in British cinema (except perhaps Davies' own follow-up The Long Day Closes, which has some of its flavour) but Distant Voices, overwhelmed as it is by the intense pain of regret and nostalgia, remains unique. Davies held out for it to be released as a single film, and was rewarded with a major prize at Cannes. ![]() The BFI backed Distant Voices, Still Lives which was conceived and shot as two separate parts: the first concentrating on the death in 1952 of his sadistic father (played memorably by a then-little-known Pete Postlethwaite), and the second chronicling the family's release into something like a happy life. ![]() Davies had already acquired a reputation in experimental circles with his confessional short film trilogy – Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration – which had taken him almost a decade to complete. Distant Voices was the 1988 feature debut of Terence Davies, the intensely neurotic Liverpudlian who would go on to make The House of Mirth and The Deep Blue Sea. That's not to say these two films run on similar tracks they themselves are practically polar opposites. ![]()
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