The Neon Bible

THE NEON BIBLE   ***1/2

Terence Davies

1995

IDEA:  Teenage David reflects back on his life growing up in 1940s Georgia, when his loving showbiz aunt moved in with his brutish father and frail mother.

BLURB:  If The Neon Bible weren’t so simply spellbinding, if it wasn’t immaculately visualized in hypnotic tracking shots, sensuous textures, painterly compositions, and liquidly elliptical scene transitions, and if it didn’t so movingly evoke, let alone create in the viewer, vibrating pulses of melancholy and quiet ecstasy, it could reasonably be taken to task for being a mannered and even perfunctory exercise from a filmmaker coasting on his style. Admittedly, some camera movements, editing tricks, and sound cues seem rote, products of a default film grammar Davies has grown too complacent with and is falling back on as a crutch. His deliberate artifice, often acutely channeling the distortion of memory and the dissonance of experience, can seem strained. But rote or familiar by Terence Davies’ standards is positively radical by so many others’. A loosely defined, impressionistic embodiment of feelings of lament, confusion, transition, and displacement,The Neon Bible looks and behaves like the singular result of one very specific cinema poet continuing to reach back to the elegiac well he knows best. He may be conjuring the same bittersweet music, but boy is it affecting to hear again.