The Cinematheque

35mm Print

“All of [Davies’s] literary adaptations are sumptuous and rich with meaning, but perhaps the finest is The House of Mirth … Anderson’s performance is subtly nuanced, being at turns lustful, playful, betrayed, and desperate.”

Hannah Gatward, Sight and Sound

The Terence Davies perspective is essentially peripheral, a search for what is just beyond reach or at the outermost extension of a thought. For Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson), to remain on the periphery means social death and destitution. She appears at the end of the 19th century out of a train’s cloud of steam; the challenge she faces is for anyone, whether family relation or marriageable man, to fully perceive her as a worthy person. Having absorbed the lessons of The Neon Bible​’s production, Davies reaches his mature style here through Edith Wharton’s novelistic New York, where power and money circulate in guarded social environments. He isn’t guided by memory or song, but through an exact awareness of invisible forces: status, desire, and emotional inference. Davies cast Anderson as Lily not because of The X‑Files, but because her photograph reminded him of John Singer Sargent’s portraits. Their collaboration is a vicious, moving drama of precarity and vulnerability.

“An essential Davies film … Beneath its gorgeous, colour-saturated façade, rages a brutal world of oppressive social rituals and expectations.”

Joanna Di Mattia, Senses of Cinema

“Overpowering … Davies’s greatest achievement [might be] his adaptation of a dense and complex novel.”

Andrew Sarris, New York Observer