Terence Davies | Death and Transfiguration / 1983

what was and wasn’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terence Davies (screenwriter and director) Death and Transfiguration / 1983

 

In Terence Davies’ third film of interconnected works surrounding his character Robert Tucker, Death and Transfiguration, we observe Tucker now as an old man about to die. In some respects, Davies has already relayed everything that he has to offer, particularly since it appears that in the interim between his middle-aged representation of his hero and this older manifestation nothing much has transpired except for the inevitable death of his mother, whose casket we see being cremated as the title comes into view.

     What this movie offers is simply a testament to his character’s basically empty life except for moments of evocative beauty and sexual delight. These are lovely to behold: the young boy dressed as an angel for Christmas called to the principal’s office to be asked if he was faithful to Christ; a moment of true pleasure from seeing pictures of male bodies, the pleasure of simply placing his hands upon his mother’s head. But mostly the images Davies shows us are similar to those we’ve already encountered, lonely moments of sorrow and pain.

      Since the narrative has nearly faded from this last work, if it even existed in the previous two films, Davies here relies on two songs to help his images cohere, the first the G. B. De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson standard sung by Doris Day, All Depends on You, one of her best performances recorded, the lyrics of which read:

     

I can be happy, I can be sad

I can be good or I can be bad

It all depends on you

I can be lonely out in a crowd

I can be humble, I can be proud

It all depends on you

I can save money, or spend it

Go right on living, or end it

You're to blame, Honey

For what I do

I know that I can be beggar

I can be King

I can be almost any old thing

It all depends on you

      This is sung as the hearse and accompanying limousines with the bright silver hubcaps go spinning through the streets on the way to the cemetery where the cremation of his mother takes place. So if this song did indeed have meaning, it’s now lost its focus for the grieving man within who finally has no other to depend on.

      Indeed, the second major song, “Someone to Watch Over Me” by George Gershwin, offers an even more poignant subject, given that this man has never found a lover or lifetime partner:

 

There's a somebody I'm longing to see

I hope that she turns out to be

Someone to watch over me

 

I'm a little lamb who's lost in a wood

I know I could always be good

To one who'll watch over me

.............

 

Won't you tell her please to put on some speed

Follow my lead, oh how I need

Someone to watch over me

Someone to watch over me

 

Since most of the movie shows his in a hospital bed being cared for nurses, it is pretty apparent     that he will have no watching over him when he dies, although during his last moments the night nurse, hearing the death rattle in her patient, sits beside him until he dies.

    Much of the film simply alternates with images of memorable and perhaps even forgettable scenes throughout his life: a young boy peering in on drunken Christmas celebrants in a bar, a scene of school Christmas pageant, his later-in-life leafing through a gay physique magazine were he bends his lips to kiss one of the male figures, a moment of dancing as a child with his mother, the instant of her death, and his final reaching out for his own younger self all lost with passage of time.

    It does not appear that the eighty-year old Tucker comes to any significant realization of how his life might have been different, but only he has been transfigured as an old man still desirous of the little pleasures he has managed to eke out of his life. It is what we all realize as we become old, that we miss all those events of youth which have come to define our lives, and that there is no way to reach them but through vague memories, tricks of the mind.

    This is perhaps the saddest film of the three since previously there was always a faint hope that Tucker might have come to accept the man he already was. But finally, it is no longer an issue of  acceptance. He has lived his life tentatively and now has only those few moments of pleasure to recall without someone to depend on or watch over him, unless it be the good nurses who indeed do seem to take care of him or, since he has always struggled to be a man of faith, perhaps the promise of Christ whose birth the film celebrates through his Christmas memories and the decoration of the tree by the nurses within his ward.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).