The Terence Davies Trilogy Review

The Terence Davies Trilogy consists of three films, Children (1976), Madonna And Child (1980) and Death And Transfiguration (1983); together they tell the story of Robert Tucker from childhood to the grave. Robert (played by Munro as a child, Mawdesly as a teenager, as a young man by Hooper, as a middle-aged man by O'Sullivan and finally by Wilfred Brambell) is a loner, born to an abusive father and loving mother, born into a city, Liverpool, that seethes with song and laughter but not for him. Terence Davies was a first-time director for Children: the masterly associations between sound and vision, memory and luminescent image that spiral through his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives are barely present at the beginning of the trilogy, but potent and omnipotent at its close.

Children re-enacts memories like a shock victim worrying at trauma. Davies presents memories as evidence: here, look, Robert receives two strokes of the cane; here, look, Robert with the other boys in his undies, undergoing a cursory medical. These are the memories of the adult Robert Tucker, who lives a life of quiet desperation as a bookkeeper (as Davies did for 12 years) and ministers to his beloved mother. "Still no interest in girls, Robbie?" asks his doctor as he prescribes anti-depressives. No, no interest in girls. Robbie lusts after the rude hairy masculinity of wrestlers, his homosexuality conflicting with his Catholic upbringing.

The father is the trauma. The angry violent father, who beats Robert's mam and has little to say to his sensitive lad (we're reminded of Ian McKellan's ageing James Whale in Gods And Monsters, saying of his Black Country working class parents that it was as if they had been handed a giraffe to raise, not a boy).