In a gently melancholy visual poem, the British director Terence Davies shares his deeply personal musings on his relationship with Liverpool, the city where he was born and where he spent his first 28 years.

Composed largely of atmospheric archive footage culled from, among others, British Pathé, the BBC, British Movietone News and Granada, and accented with Davies’s lyrical narration, it’s both a celebration and a eulogy for an iconic city.

In Of Time and the City, shown at Cannes in the Special Screening section, Davies uses his own life’s journey to explore aspects of Liverpool’s past and present.

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A fervently Roman Catholic child – he talks of his “dogged piety” and of “years wasted in useless prayer” – Davies has now embraced atheism with a born-again zeal. Likewise the city, once oversupplied with places of worship, has deconsecrated many of its churches and replaced Communion wine with imported beer and bar snacks in their new incarnations as bars and restaurants.

Davies, his wonderfully fruity delivery dripping with sarcasm, wonders whether God disapproves of cocktails in Babylon.

The soundtrack choices are largely exquisite. John Tavener’s exultant The Protecting Veil invests a poignancy to footage of Liverpool’s past. Peggy Lee croons The Folks Who Live on the Hill as a backdrop to footage of Liverpool’s brutally ugly high rises and housing estates. But the choice of He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My brother as Davies talks about a sibling in an army hospital is a corny choice that sits uncomfortably with the rest of the film. Although Davies clearly has no love for the concrete monoliths scarred with graffiti and dissatisfaction, he’s not sentimental about the slums they replaced. There’s plenty of grainy footage of endless, identical rows of squat terraces. Pigeon-chested, rickety children play with piles of rubble. The pavements where so much day-to-day life takes place seem permanently washed with rain. We see archive footage of those derelict slums being pulled down in clouds of dust and bad memories.

This is very much a portrait of a working-class city, replete with images of factory gates, dockers in cloth caps and brawny-armed women wrestling with the laundry.

There is a hint of another side of Liverpool – Davies talks of a part of town where “people sounded their Hs and knew what sculleries were”. But there is little footage to illustrate it.

Davies’s voiceover is a wry delight, packed with stinging asides and delivered with a lugubrious relish – you imagine he would be a wonderful dinner-party guest.

There’s a similarity of tone to James Mason’s narration in the 1967 film The London Nobody Knows, another portrait of a changing city that would make a rewarding double bill with this regret-filled love letter to Liverpool.

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