Terence Davies | Madonna and Child / 1980

pietà

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terence Davies (screenwriter and director) Madonna and Child / 1980

 

In the second episode in his “Trilogy”— which I have retitled a “Triptych” becomes of that word’s relationship with images which define Terence Davies’ works—the director picks up with the same character featured in Children, Robert Tucker (Terry O’Sullivan in this film) as now a middle-aged man.

    The older Tucker is perhaps even more depressed than the young and slightly older version of himself in the first work, in this work moving back and forth on weekends to visit his aging mother (Sheila Raynor), who throughout this is gradually declining in health, unable to stay awake or, at other times, walk or even stand for long periods.

     In Madonna and Child, predictably, Tucker is still deeply attached to his mother, almost pathologically so. And as she once often broke into tears upon leaving her home wherein those tears were incubated, Tucker now does so on a regular basis—in part because of his sorrow over his gradual loss of the mother he once knew, but also in response to the inner conflicts of his own being. Still a devout Catholic, he is struggling to position himself in a world as a gay man in which he is most certainly damned. If his depression is grounded in his relationship with his mother and his childhood family life with her, it is exacerbated surely by his inability to assimilate himself into adult society. He is forever, just as he was as a child, the outsider, someone betwixt and between the world around him. Working at a job as a clerk, he ferries between his two worlds like a shadow. Derek Jarman has described Tucker’s transitory life quite nicely:

 

“Like Kafka’s prisoner, Tucker is eternally transient, in waiting rooms for interviews, in corridors at school, at hospital, in flight from the realities of his homosexuality, forced into a series of disguises that cover the poverty of soul of provincial life. By day the efficient, repressed, besuited clerk at the office, by night the leather and chains of the sado-masochist; order in disorder, but in which camouflage does the backdrop to this very ordinary life of the Church, with its transfigurations of the violence of existence, centre around the confessional where Tucker can never bring himself to confess the truth of his inner life?”

 

      It is difficult to imagine that this rather mature view of gay desperation was made as a student film, for the completion of Davies work at the National Film School, for which his first film had gained him entry. And what is even more extraordinary is that, despite the natural reticence of the director to confront his characters’ homosexuality throughout his career to date, this film is actually quite expressive of Tucker’s closeted gay life. Jennifer Hawarth recalls that when the film was first shown the in her class, the reaction was one of puzzlement: “After watching a cut of Madonna with visiting tutor Alexander Mackendrick I remember somebody asking him, “Is it a gay film?” “It’s the least gay film I’ve ever seen,” was the reply.

      Clearly the work is conflicted, but in fact it is Davies’ most gay film to date. Here we see scenes of Tucker sneaking out of his mother’s house in his leather jacket—collar up to make him appear in the dark of the stairway as if he were Dracula—in order to visit an S&M gay bar, from which he is turned away for lack of a membership card, another indication of his inability to belong to any world in which he might seek entry. Without any other sexual outlet, Tucker is forced to visit the cottages for urinal sex, the scene of which is quite graphic for a 1980 film—although it is interesting that in the same year Francis Savel’s Équation à un inconnu presented us with a very graphic gay bathroom sex scene and the very next year German director Frank Ripploh released what might almost be described as his panegyric to public toilet sex, Taxi to the Toilets.

 

     Yet Davies’ film goes even further when, soon after the urinal scene, Tucker calls a tattooist to see if he might get a tattoo inscribed on his penis. Told that it will cost a great deal of money, that he will have to keep an erection during the long process, and that it will be incredibly painful, plus being insulted by the tattoo artist for possibly endangering his life in the process with disease and being told numerous times that he will tolerate no “messy,” presumably meaning no sexual encounter, the usually submissive and quiet Tucker intensely repeats, “Will you do it for me? Will you do it?” “Naw, I won’t touch your prick for less than 50.” And finally the tattoo artist adamantly declines to operate. It would have been revelatory to know what he might have wanted tattooed on that bodily organ; pitifully I can imagine only the word “Mother.”

       Yes, this is a gay movie even if we end up in confession with Tucker—whereas Jarman hints he refuses to admit to the most important of his sins—sitting in a dark room with a grown man in tears over the inevitable decline of his mother’s health. But despite these obviously sentimental but also terribly moving scenes, the movie overall reminds me most of Kenneth Anger’s coming out film of 1947, Fireworks, with its urinal scenes, fellatio fetishes, and its recurring images of the pietà. The only problem for Tucker is that he can never fully come out of the deep shadows and the bonds of mother and Church, or Church as mother. If he feels doomed like Eurydice to the underworld, strangely enough he cannot find his token for entry.

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).