Liverpool Story: Portrait of a City review – city symphony goes down the identity route

Daniel Draper’s ultra-fluid style, trailing his finger across the surface of the city’s life, loses its narrative path

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.