Recommend a new or newish film you've seen fairly recently.

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills What spires, what farms are those? That is the Land of Lost Content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went, And cannot come again. - A. E. Housman



OF TIME And The City is about Liverpool, the grimy northern English city on the Mersey, so it's odd that Terence Davies opens the film by reciting these famous lines. What blue remembered hills and what farms? More like docks, slums and housing estates, surely.

The film does have plenty of those, but it's the last four lines that carry the weight for him. This is Davies reflecting on himself, as much as Liverpool. He has said it's not a work of nostalgia, but it is certainly a film saturated with memory and emotion. At times it's almost unbearably sad as he ponders what has become of the city in which he grew up poor, Catholic and gay: "We love the place we hate . . . We leave the place we love." ....................

.......Davies tells us of his childhood - Catholic tribalism, and a huge cathedral, sectarian hatreds, his sexuality awakened at the Friday-night wrestling, repressive anti-gay laws but still a time of innocence. He intones in a deep, profoundly sceptical voice, like an ageing actor of the classics: "On slow Saturdays when football, like life, was still played in black and white and shorts as long as underwear, when it was still not venal and when sportsmen and women knew how to win and lose with grace, and never to punch the air in victory . . ."

.................It is an intensely personal film, nakedly confessional and frank, uncensored and painfully honest. It is unlike anything he has made, except perhaps in its tone. Davies is a master of melancholy self-reflection. This film sheds light on where his feature films came from, as much as the city he lost

Ordinary frailties honestly exposed


Neighbours Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) are drawn to each other in Two Lovers.

TWO LOVERS (M) ****
Cinema Nova (109 minutes)
Reviewer Philippa Hawker

JAMES Gray's Two Lovers begins and ends with images of memorable yet casual vividness. They exemplify the beautifully composed yet bleakly quotidian qualities of the film, its certainties about character and detail, its striking combination of intensity and delicacy.

What they don't indicate, however, is something that emerges gradually in the course of the movie — its emotional generosity.

Two Lovers stars Joaquin Phoenix as Leonard, a withdrawn man who is living with his parents (Moni Mashonov and Isabella Rossellini) in the Brooklyn neighbourhood where he grew up. Two Lovers is grounded in a sense of place, of the history, expectations and loss that a location can represent.

Leonard tells a story of what happened to him that might or might not be true; but it's never really made explicit why he has reached this impasse in his life. What is clear to us, however, is that he is solitary, that he has been self-destructive, and that he hasn't emerged from the tight embrace of his family.

But something is about to change. He meets a new neighbour, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), and is immediately drawn to her.

Meanwhile, his parents have plans for him. They are keen to introduce him to the family who is taking over their small business, particularly the daughter, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw). Leonard is also drawn to her, and she seems eager to see more of him.

And so he spends time in a kind of shuttle between each woman: Michelle, troubled, glamorous, needy, prone to calling late at night and requesting support and advice; Sandra, warm, kind-hearted, almost too ready to assume the role of protector. They bring out different aspects of Leonard; he is both elevated and torn by what they are offering him and expecting from him.

Clearly, they represent different possibilities, but they never feel reductive or oversimplified figures.

Phoenix (who also starred in Gray's The Yards and We Own The Night) effortlessly conveys Leonard's awkwardness and diffidence, but also his yearning, and a sense that he is venturing outside himself, that he beginning to take risks. It's a strongly physical performance, but it always seems to be holding something back. Phoenix — in what has been touted as his last screen role — never feels as if he has mastered the character, but that he is in the process of discovering him.

There is something generous throughout Two Lovers about the way Gray defines his characters and their motives. In part, it is because of what he is prepared to leave unsaid. Some things are made clear about them, some are left mysterious and ambiguous.

There are no cheap targets, and there is no demonising. Leonard, for example, sometimes chafes against his parents, and feels oppressed by what they ask of him, but they're never seen as crudely suffocating figures in themselves. Rossellini gives a lovely performance of half-suppressed solicitude; her character can't, no matter how hard she tries, stop herself from keeping watch and checking up on her son, but she does her best to maintain a loving distance.

Even a secondary character, played by Elias Koteas, is not the kind of villain or heavy he could easily have been.

But this doesn't make the film evasive or easy, and it doesn't give the last scene any obvious sense of finality. Despair and confusion are explored in Two Lovers with a rigorous, unsentimental directness that is also full of feeling.