Now with three films about different facets of the city under his belt, documentary-maker Daniel Draper has a strong claim to being Liverpool’s leading contemporary chronicler. Resuming the meandering, eavesdropping modus operandi of his 2021 Toxteth survey Almost Liverpool 8, he attempts to cast his net citywide for a grand collage of scouse life. But by losing the self-conscious formal questions in the earlier film, he struggles to impose defining concepts that get Liverpool Story pulling in a satisfying direction.
Draper’s relationship with the past seems different to Terence Davies’s 2008 memory-bath masterpiece Of Time and the City. Prefacing the film with a Thoreau quote about how “shallow” the stream of time can prove to be, the director seems less interested in history than what’s downstream: identity. After the opening shots of what is meant to be the Mersey bottom, thoughts of sediment and mixture quickly settle. A black antifascist reminds us that the Liverpool accent is quintessentially multicultural: a blend of Irish, Welsh and Norwegian, straight off the docks.
Draper continues in this ultra-fluid style, trailing his finger across the surface of the city’s life in many aspects – Everton matchday processions, religious icon-carvers, Muslim prayers – as disembodied, unattributed narration floats over it. But it lacks the symphonic rigour of Julien Temple’s similarly multifarious London: The Modern Babylon, and threatens to dissipate completely. Haphazardly organised, choosing not to narratively develop individual segments that are left behind before they fully register, Liverpool Story only gathers sparse thematic moss.
Maybe the pacing is intentional, to reflect urban ephemerality; it doesn’t help us understand the locality of Liverpool any better. One comment about the city centre having lost its identity is telling – but homogeneity also seeps into the film. Too many of the aperçus about the place revealing its true character after dark, or being best understood on foot, could also apply to any metropolis. Settling for the picturesque instead of the psychogeographic, this panorama is admirably social-minded but could have used a clearer road map.
• Liverpool Story: Portrait of a City is in cinemas from 21 November.
