United Kingdom, 1988
Directed by Terence Davies
With Angela Walsh (Eileen), Lorraine Ashbourne (Maisie), Dean Williams (Tony), Freda Dowie (the mother), Pete Postlethwaite (the father)

Songs are entertainment, custom, memories. People sing the evenings away, gathered around their local pub’s tables or sitting in their living room. The songs are passed along from one generation to the next, unless they symbolize new times, but always arouse sympathy and emotion. Tunes and lyrics definitely bear testimony to the best of one’s life on this Earth, or the worst.
The film goes from song to song. The incessant and varied stream of music provides an emotional background holding the narrative more firmly than the elliptical montage juxtaposing short scenes illustrating various periods and situations and featuring brief exchanges of words, and sometimes just an erratic sentence. This stream is also like the emotional bond enabling characters to stick together through thick and thin. What songs stand for is bigger than the fleeting images, and perhaps better.
The highly elaborate narrative is clearly divided into two parts: the distant voices coming from a past haunted by the ruthless father and the still lives into which his three children get mired once adults. But the first part is actually built around an adult’s decision, the marriage of Eileen; as relatives and close friends celebrate in the evening of the wedding ceremony, Eileen, her sister Maisie, her brother Tony, and their mother remember what their lives used to be when the patriarch was still around – the wedding comes seemingly just after his funeral; this part is shot in rather dark or cold colors and lighting, with elements seguing into each other in an astonishing way. The film’s second part remains visually a scattered affair, as it tracks at the same time those four different lives and how they handle the passage of time; it goes from the birth of Maisie’s child to Tony’s own wedding, in a rather coherent chronology; the episodes are shot in a warmer palette, with a more cutting and flashy style of editing.
These people are from Liverpool; their narrative spans a generation’s time, from the late 1930s to the very beginning of the 1960s; theirs is the world of the English working class, captured away from work and inside their intimacy. Shot, with difficulty, over two years, at the acme of the Thatcherite rule, the film has a strong autobiographical component. It stands as a memento mori for both a popular culture and a social class that were already on the wane as the United Kingdom was willy-nilly jumping into the post-industrial and globalized context defining the 21st century.
The highly impressionistic approach to the characters’ stories and sentiments, which brings to mind the style of Virginia Woolf, reflects the uncertain, scattered, and emotional nature of memories. It makes for a delicate and poignant portrait of humble people, plainly focusing on their woes and pains and thus turning them into touching actors of a powerful tragedy born out of real life, even as those dramatis personae have socially and culturally nothing to do with those of William Shakespeare or indeed Virginia Woolf. There is a deep sense of what their contradictions, foibles, and secrets, are and mean, elements that are captured in tableaux, carefully composed images with a group of characters or only one right at the center, eyes often set towards the camera which just waits for the emotion to seep from a gaze, a gesture, or a word.
The songs can strikingly illustrate the sentiments and even comment on them, sometimes with a bitter irony. But they also feed into the sense of community that is a natural component of these hardscrabble lives and provide welcome relief or the chance to air untold hopes. The father slaps his elder daughter because the kids took too much time to get to the air-raid shelter but then takes her in his arms, pressing her to sing and then singing with her as fear gnaws at everybody’s heart under the bombs. The mother curtly reprimands the couple for quarreling – we will have none of that – and then invites the friend to sing and the songs are back, harping on love – this is always what is left. But a jazz singer can still give love another try, it does not keep the father from beating and hurting again the mother.
Why did you marry him, a daughter asks. The essence of the tragedy lies in the awkward relation to men. There is a difference of behavior between the characters and the generations: Eileen’s husband and other men of his age do not raise their arms against women but their words can carry an even greater violence as they are keen to assert their views. The gruff, clumsy but terrible attitude of the father shocks but also awes. Unfair as it is, this is still the home’s rule – and men are keen to set limits on women’s freedom. Most of them are just housewives; getting a situation is not easy, neither is it expected. Dancing the evening away, singing love and keeping a sharp tongue are the only tools to keep one’s dignity – but not every gal is lucky enough to use them at will.
Meanwhile, men talk and drink their free time away and dream about racing bets paying off or soccer teams at long last winning big, in a rather good sign of the times; leisure matters and survival is not such a big deal after the war; the father was not so lucky, but still enjoyed the company of a horse, a living being that seemed sometimes more valuable to him than his family. This monster of a man leaves behind him bitter memories, although feelings seemed to have mellowed them in the case of Eileen and even in the case of her mother. Still, this unvarnished view of personal hardship keeps the film to be a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. It may not even be the point. Rather, the film eloquently bears witness to behaviors and mindsets that defined the background of many, aware of their deep problems and proud of the shared moments. It reaches the goal through amazingly consummate skills from what is a young director. Terence Davies quietly explores the ability of the cinema medium to reconstruct personal experiences through visions that are prosaic as well as poetic, elliptic as well as epiphanic.