Distant Voices, Still Lives (15)

They don't make 'em like that any more. But then, they never did. The films of Terence Davies remain a unique, marvellous anomaly in British cinema. Released in 1988, his first feature Distant Voices, Still Lives had some sort of a context then: it echoed a lineage of British films about working-class life, but also had some kinship with the deeply personal, poetic (and more explicitly avant-garde) films of Derek Jarman and contemporaries. Now re-released, Davies's feature strikes you as not having dated at all - partly because it was never "of its time" - but also as a melancholy instance of a path opened up in British cinema, and barely followed since.

Drawing on Davies's memories, Distant Voices, Still Lives portrays a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool in the Forties and Fifties. The film comprises two chapters, "Distant Voices" and "Still Lives", the first part completed before Davies embarked on the second, two years later. Once you know this, you begin to detect in "Still Lives" an odd sense of lived experience: when people in the film refer to the past, you feel that they really mean the past, one that they've actually lived through together. "Still Lives" is also marked by a ghostly absence, that of the family's now-dead father, played by Peter Postlethwaite in "Distant Voices".

The film is less a story than a portrait, and less of one family than of a now-lost culture. Instead of narrative, Davies gives us fragments, tableaux, contemplative tracking shots, small revelations in picture and sound, jumbled like loose pages in a photo album. The film works by echoes and patterns: for example, beginning and ending with weddings. Voice-over dialogue gives us characters' unspoken thoughts. Over the first smiling wedding group, bride Eileen (Angela Walsh) is heard thinking, "I wish me dad were here." "I don't," responds her sister Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), as if telepathically, "he was a bastard." Dad emerges as a troubled figure oscillating between love and hate, tenderness and violence. In a flashback to a Christmas long past (though Davies never flashes so much as glides back), Dad intones a gentle "God bless" over his sleeping brood: in the very next shot, he fumes before wrecking the Christmas table.

The film particularly espouses a female point of view, celebrating its women's fortitude and empathising with their sorrows in a way inflected by the Hollywood melodrama that Davies grew up on (Joan Crawford might have felt at home on his Merseyside). We see Freda Dowie's Mum - strangely protean, all things to all her relatives - bruised and weeping at Dad's beating, while Ella Fitzgerald croons "Taking a Chance on Love". Most women suffer bitterly here, but there's a sort of pragmatic dream romance between the sisters' friend Micky (a brash, mouthy, marvellous performance by Debi Jones) and her Jack-the-Lad husband - a constant mutual barrage of sarky insults, but one that emits a real sexual passion and wit, duelling with a dash of Hepburn-Tracy.

With his pre-pop sensibility, Davies's memory is an archive of popular music and myth before Elvis. Watch the film once, then go again with your eyes closed, and listen to the tissue of off- and on-screen voices, fragments of film dialogue, radio programmes, and songs heard and sung along to. This is cinema as radio, which isn't as paradoxical as it might seem: Davies begins with the one element in the film that doesn't belong to the past but to this day runs through the national consciousness - the Shipping Forecast, accompanied by the perennial British downpour (and nowhere in cinema is rain so palpably damp and bone-chilling as in Davies's films).

It's seven years since Davies's last feature, the underrated The House of Mirth: that his career seems permanently stalled remains the mystery of British cinema. The idea of a national film industry without space for a vision so personal and so penetrating is just an absurdity, and a scandal. There's a Davies retrospective currently on at London's BFI Southbank: go, marvel, and rage.

j.romney@independent.co.uk