Of Time and the City (2008)

[lsanderson]

Looking Back, With Affection and Angst
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 21, 2009

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

These lines, from “Little Gidding,” the last of T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” have an abstract, mystical cast. But when the British filmmaker Terence Davies recites them in his cinematic memoir “Of Time and the City,” they acquire a bracing and poignant specificity.

Mr. Davies started in Liverpool, the eponymous city in this lovely, astringent film and the setting for much of his other work, including “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988), “The Long Day Closes” (1992) and the trilogy made up of “Children,” “Madonna and Child” and “Death and Transfiguration.”

“Of Time and the City” is this director’s first documentary, and it revisits some of the themes of those earlier autobiographical movies, in particular the pains and pleasures of growing up Roman Catholic and gay in postwar Britain. More