![]() Like the play, the film opens with a suicide attempt by Hester. ![]() Though the opening credits identify the film, somewhat modestly, as "Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea," Davies' adaptation is a significant reworking of the play, jettisoning much of its first act, adding many new scenes, and, in effect changing its whole central point. It invites a diagrammatic approach-the introduction of the central character, the weighing of the husband and the lover against one another, the gradual movement of the plot toward a climactic moment of realization-which is exactly what Davies doesn't do. What this sets up is a typical tragic dilemma: the crossroads where both directions lead downhill. They are also opposites in terms of class (the husband rich and well-bred, the pilot poor and a tad crude) and age (the husband noticeably older than Hester, the pilot younger), and are played by contrasting physical types: Beale is a soft, bearish man whose face is round and bearded Hiddleston is lean, with an angular, clean-shaven face.īoth men have their good qualities and their shortcomings, but neither is able to fulfill Hester's needs (the film's title comes from the English expression "between the devil and the deep blue sea," which means to be caught in a situation where neither outcome is desirable). The husband has an outward coldness that hides a gentle, pushover nature the pilot's passion disguises a general lack of ambition and an inability to commit. These two men represent archetypal opposites. His method of piecing a movie together, which favors texture over shape, results in occasionally wonky or unclear storytelling-yet it also makes for engrossing, transportive film-viewing.Ĭommissioned by the estate of Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) on the occasion of the once-trendy English playwright's 100th birthday, The Deep Blue Sea (previously filmed by Anatole Litvak in 1955) centers around Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a woman who leaves her husband Sir William (stage actor Simon Russell Beale), a respected judge, for the handsome and impulsive RAF pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). Instead of a scene-based structure that emphasizes development and an action-based narrative, Davies works in chunks of time, drawn-out moments whose purpose isn't immediately clear and which sometimes begin in media res. Davies' sense of construction, however, is anything but classical. Sure, there's a certain Anglo-American studio classicism to the film's use of dissolves and visual shorthand, and to the complicated crane shots which open and close the movie-slow, grand movements of the camera that suggest a character emerging from and, later, receding into the London cityscape. ![]() Again: a dead world.Ĭonsidering Davies' obsession with the popular music, clothing, social mores, and speech patterns of his favorite era, one of the most immediately striking things about The Deep Blue Sea-and all of Davies' films-is how little it resembles the cinema of the period. It goes without saying that the majority of Davies' characters, being adults in the 1940s and 1950s, would be dead by now. It is a period bookended by death: World War II (the events of which are felt-but remain largely unseen-in almost all of Davies' films) on one end, and the disappearance of a certain kind of culture on the other. ![]() The eccentric English filmmaker has never made a feature that was set past the 1950s all but one of his films- The House of Mirth (2000), set in the 1890s-take place in a mid-century limbo, a world drawn partly from childhood memories (Davies was born in 1945) and partly from the literature of the period ( The Deep Blue Sea itself is adapted from a 1952 play), haunted by the specter of harsh wartime life, unaware of its own coming obsolescence. ![]() This contradiction is the essence of Davies' style. In short, the world of The Deep Blue Sea is a dead world-and yet, it's a dead world that moves, breathes, and, above all, sings. Every interior is underlit, and the actors, their faces grayish-pale, often resemble corpses. Designed in various shades of lamplight, soap scum, and cigarette ash-with contrapuntal dashes of lilac, powder blue, and crabshell red-Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea is one bleak, glum-looking movie. ![]()
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