The Long Day Closes (1992)

Since The Godfather, most period films are shot with warm, amber tones to help romanticize the past. It's a sort of emotional shortcut which has gradually turned into a cliché. At first blush it might seem as though this is what Terence Davies was trying to do with his lushly photographed melodrama, The Long Day Closes. But as you watch the film, one quickly comes to realize that rather than a romantic look back at youth, Davies is instead giving an extremely accurate emotional depiction of his own childhood as he experienced it day by day.

Like a young Candy Darling who would put blue food coloring into his bath water so that it would more closely resemble the technicolor blue he saw every week at the local cinema, young Terence Davies was also cognitively reframing his harsh, working class childhood in cinematic terms. For movie people like them, the theater is not merely a temporary refuge. It's a not just a physical place where you can go for a few hours and everything is all right. For them, cinema is a way of life. It is something that lives inside of them. Things might get rough at times, but a sweeping camera move and yearning pop song is surely just around the corner.