Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) on Netflix
In Liverpool, Maisie, Tony and their mother gather for Eileen's wedding. The day brings back a childhood under a violent father, and the grown children's search for love.
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- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.4/105,801 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
Eileen is married in Liverpool, and her siblings Maisie and Tony and their mother are there for the celebration. The wedding day brings back the family's years in the 1940s, when their father beat their mother and left the children emotionally hurt. The film moves between the wedding and that working-class Catholic household, where songs, the cinema, light entertainment and the pub were part of daily life. The music gives the family a voice beyond their quiet lives, and the characters sing the popular songs of the period. Maisie, Tony and Eileen have reached the early 1950s as unhappy adults still wanting the love they missed as children.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Distant Voices, Still Lives is made up of two separate films, shot two years apart, but with the same cast and crew for both.
- Terence Davies had his own family sing the film's songs onto tapes, then used the ones he had heard them sing and liked best; he admitted knowing what to leave out was difficult.
- Davies drew the film's family from his own life: he was the youngest of ten children in a working-class Catholic household in post-war Liverpool, and his father, a violent man, died when he was six and a half.
- Terence Davies could not rebuild the childhood home demolished in 1961 for Distant Voices, Still Lives because there was no budget, so the crew shot in Drayton Park, a working-class street whose houses had no cellars; he rebuilt the house later for The Long Day Closes.
- The sequence in which the sisters Eileen and Maisie watch Love is a Many Splendored Thing while Maisie's husband George has a serious accident was inspired by The Futurist, Liverpool's first purpose-built cinema, which opened in 1912 and closed in 1982.
