The Long Day Closes (film)

Plot

The film is set in Liverpool in mid-1950s. The story concerns 11-year-old Bud and his loving mother and siblings. He lives a life rich in imagination, centred on family relationships, church, and the struggles of a shy boy at school. Music and snatches of movie dialogue allow him to enrich his narrow physical environment. "Together these fragments", wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times, "evoke a postwar England starved for beauty, fantasy and a place to escape."

Cast

Music

The film uses 35 pieces of music, many of them in their entirety. Critic David Thomson in his April 2007 review of the film in the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine draws attention to the music that was used in the film, in particular "at the end of the film ... that mackerel sky and Sir Arthur Sullivan's 'The Long Day Closes' itself" sung by Pro Cantione Antiqua.

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 82% approval rating based on reviews from 11 critics, with an average rating of 7 out of 10. On Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 85/100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

A 2009 appreciation said:

Working with the most basic and most ethereal of cinematic materials — time and memory — Mr. Davies has devised a mosaiclike film language. Childhood recollections are consecrated as moments out of time and assembled into a symphonic collage, guided more by emotional logic than by plot or chronology. The working-class milieu that tends to be associated with the drab naturalism of the British kitchen-sink school, here comes swaddled in sensory delights: stately tracking shots and overhead angles, gusts of Mahler and Nat King Cole. The overall effect is one of muted rapture, a swelling ecstasy held in check by a constant tug of sadness.

Critic Armond White stated that "If asked to name the greatest gay film ever made, I’d say, with no hesitation, The Long Day Closes."