Terence Davies | Children / 1976

the old folks at home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terence Davies (screenwriter and director) Children / 1976

 

Terence Davies’ very first film already demonstrates his gift for photographic images that communicate narrative in a way that permits him to delimit story or plot, as well as indicating his fascination with the relationship with image, music, and movement. It’s all there, if a bit awkwardly strung together and in its length “strung out” as a series of images that go on far too long (about 44 minutes) in his 1976 work Children which would eventually become the first of a “triptych”—and I do think the word is associated more with art than the literary connected work “trilogy,” the title generally given to such trios, is more appropriate.

      Children begins with just boys, trapped in the brutal environment of a Liverpool Catholic School wherein they imitate the harsh methods of the teachers by torturing one another. The small indoor playground in which the film begins contains several boys already roughhousing before the triumvirate of the school bullies arrive, the other boys speeding off, leaving the smallest, shyest, almost autistic specimen, Robert Tucker (Philllip Mawdsley) to suffer the blows of their perversity. Fortunately, from a high window a teacher blows a whistle, presumably having nothing to do with demanding they cease their activities, but only to indicate that recess is over and classes are ready to begin once more.

      Soon after we observe several boys, among them Tucker, waiting in their underwear to be checked by the school doctor. The young boy sits away from the others who are even then seemingly cooking up ways to torture him, and surely mocking his existence. Later in the halls he is met up with a larger boy who once again threatens him, but this time he fights back, almost getting the better of the bigger lug until a teacher stops them, determining to punish both by taking a short whip to their wrists and hands, almost like the mythical rulers reportedly applied to student hands by punishing nuns in just such schools.

      When Tucker rejoins his classmates he is forced to write out essays as the others appear to be doing under the watchful eye of another teacher who equally seems irritated even by the existence of the young student who answers all questions with “Yes, sir.”

       When Tucker readies to leave the school at the end of day, it is like the beginning of a sprint wherein he must unrun other boys who chase him home where he temporarily finds a moment of safety before having to meet up with his even more violent father (Nick Stringer), who takes out most of his testosterone-fired hostility on his wife, the mother (Valerie Lilley) the boy clearly idolizes for her gentle ministrations and the hard work she undergoes to make her small row house into a home.

       Given the world in which he finds himself entrapped, we have to ask whether it should surprise us that Tucker is nearly mute with endless fear. Even as a grown man, who we see interspersed among these scenes, he seems still uncommunicative, terrified it appears of even crossing the streets to get to an employment advisor who has apparently found him a job, but recognizes the difficulties the older Tucker has in simply keeping it.

        And there is his standard question: has he yet met a girl who might interest him? Although Davies is quite subtle about the issue of homosexuality in much of his work, we recognize that Tucker is queer. As the young boy, we see him in the shower carefully scrutinizing a handsome older boy near him, who puts his hand into his own bathing suit as Tucker’s eyes grow larger and almost greedy with awe. We see the older Tucker about to be fellated by a male friend expressing his absolute pleasure with the word “Jesus,” although even that may be a facet of his imagination stimulated by the collage he has created of beefy wrestlers on the inside of his closet door. 

     Davies’ intense sexual discretion in all of his films appears to explain his interest in the corseted playwrights of the 1950s such as Terence Rattigan to whom the director made homage in his film The Deep Blue Sea. I tend to be on the side of Joe Orton and his murderous lover Kenneth Halliwell’s mockery of that playwright, and agree with Shelagh Delaney’s assessment after seeing a Rattigan play that anyone might write a better play, penning A Taste of Honey in response. Even a gay boy pretending to be the father of the bastard a young girl is about to bear was better that the father Davies serves up.

      Perhaps his subtlety when it comes to sexual feelings leaves one even more frustrated given the fact that for such figures such as Tucker there is little else that he might find of pleasure and joy. Clearly he loves, as a child, riding with his mother in a bus as the multitudinous rows of houses just as the one in which he lives pass by with the frequency of lines of soldiers in a Kremlin May Day parade. This is one of the many scenes in Children might have been trimmed; and even the joy expresses is curtailed when the son finally turns back to discover his mother in tears, she evidently finally being able to express the pain she daily undergoes while locked away in their claustrophobic home in a public space.

       Even when his father dies and is screwed into his coffin, the young boy is still terrified, perhaps that that his elder may suddenly jump out and surprise him with a brutal lashing. When neighboring women arrive to help with the funeral wake, he is afraid to let them in, having obviously been taught by his father to keep away from all outsiders and to keep them out of the house.

       It is only when the hearse comes to cart away the body in the coffin that a sly smile makes its way upon the boy’s face, a smile he cannot easily erase until a short while later the actual significance of no longer having a father profoundly expresses itself in his own private ritual of tears more as a release of the pent up hurt, pain, and suffering the man has wrought than for any sorrow that he is finally gone.

     Children is truly a bleak film, but it is also, at moments, terribly funny and beautiful through its series of images and songs. How cannot we not drop our jaws in amazement as we hear the children of the school in which they are imprisoned, in their high pure voices in unison intoning the memories invoked by Stephen Foster’s lines “far from the old folks at home” while Davies’ camera focuses on the shabby halls of what will someday will surely represent their nostalgic visions of where they lost their own youth? Or to witness what appears almost as a Hallmark Card scene of a father, mother, and son gathered round the fireplace where a moment later the father crashes his fists into the mother’s face, while the child sent upstairs tries desperately to plug up his ears with his bed cover and pillows.

      That Davies was able to create such a profound work with no cinematic experience on a nonexistent budget is almost miraculous, worthy of the title of the second of the triptych, Madonna and Child.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).