New Releases: 'The Deep Blue Sea'

The Deep Blue Sea
98 minutes, R, UK/USA
Release Date March 23 2012
Distributor Music Box Films
Director Terence Davies
Screenplay Terence Davies, based on the play by Terence Rattigan
Producers Katherine Butler, Sean O'Connor, Kate Ogborn, Lisa Marie Russo
Cinematography Florian Hoffmeister
Editor David Charap
Production Designer James Merifield
Art Director David Hindle
Costume Designer Ruth Myers
Cast Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale, Ann Mitchell, Jolyon Coy, Karl Johnson, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sarah Kants, Oliver Ford Davies, Barbara Jefford, Mark Tandy, Stuart McLoughlin, Nicolas Amer

The ravishing new film from Terence Davies is maybe the lushest movie you'll see (and hear) all year: a "cinematic opera," as Sight & Sound's Jonathan Romney termed it, that reaches deliriously vivid heights of melodrama and aching emotion. Set "around 1950," The Deep Blue Sea is set in that dreary postwar London familiar to us from British classics of the '40s and '50s (Brief Encounter, It Always Rains on Sunday), not to mention Davies' own earlier films (Distant Voices, Still Lives from 1988, The Long Day Closes from 1992). Rubble litters the cobblestone streets; everything is washed in pale browns and grays, with smatterings of color. Davies, a director thrillingly consumed by attention to detail, recreates the setting with visceral immediacy: every ad beaming from brick walls, every cigarette pack and storefront display, immerses us in this time and place. Movies can be time travel machines, and The Deep Blue Sea achieves an overwhelming transplantation.

Terence Rattigan, the celebrated playwright who would have turned 100 this year (he died in 1977), wrote the play on which The Deep Blue Sea is based: a quietly tragic story of a love affair between a cavalier, insecure war veteran (Hiddleston) and a self-sacrificing woman (Weisz) married to a gentle but stolid judge (Beale). For his adaptation, Davies excised heaps of expositional dialogue and a few additional characters from Rattigan's play, preferring instead to suggest the characters' histories and psychologies through brief glances, through dexterous crosscutting, through images that pop with color and light and a dynamic use of sound versus silence. Davies' boyhood love of going to the movies in postwar Liverpool (musicals especially) seemingly bestowed a keen understanding of what makes movies cinematic, of how to manipulate sound and image for maximum effect (André Bazin, whose essay "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson" addressed the art of adapting literary or theatrical texts to parallel cinematic terrain, likely would have appreciated Davies' work).

The movie wows us viscerally from its first image, a swooping crane shot that climbs leisurely up to the second-story window from which Hester Collyer (Weisz's character) gazes ardently. The music on the soundtrack is Samuel Barber's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, a piece which actually continues over the ensuing ten-minute prologue, a montage of brief though telling episodes that tell us all we need to know: Collyer's docile though empty relationship with her upper-class husband; her irresistible attraction to the cocky, roguish ex-RAF pilot, Freddie; the passionate onset of their relationship; the dissolution of her marriage. The story itself — what happens after this prologue — is merely what happens throughout the course of one day between Hester and the people revolving around her. ("Merely" is a somewhat misleading word here, since these interactions take on the scope perhaps not of Greek tragedy, but at least of exuberant melodrama.) The immediate employment of such overt editing and cinematographical techniques, all of them set to music that's similarly operatic in its emotion, pulls back the curtains to set the stage in an appropriately fervent way: here's a larger-than-life stage play, ordinary and extraordinary, restaged for the camera's eye.

The legacy of war makes its appearance in surprisingly cryptic ways. Most overt is a gorgeous flashback sequence instigated by Hester's desperate escape to a barren nighttime subway platform. Hester has already attempted suicide once earlier in the film; it's possible she's fled underground in order to throw herself in front of an oncoming train, a fate from which she's saved by the vision she soon experiences. A sublime single tracking shot passes slowly along a group of Londoners who have sought refuge from German firebombs. One man on the subway platform sings "Molly Malone," the mid-19th century Irish ballad. Debris floats to the ground as thunderous booms erupt overhead. The tracking shot ends with Hester embracing the man she will soon marry, the esteemed judge Sir William Collyer. There is tenderness in their embrace, but more the sort between a father and daughter than between husband and wife. This foreshadows the anguish Hester will feel later in life, when she's discovered that her youthful passion (perhaps even the morbid thrill of looming mortality provided by the war) has given way to soul-crushing inertia. This meticulous and powerful one-shot sequence may be the movie's most awe-inspiring moment — a tricky claim to make for a movie filled with them.

The gaping craters bestowed by wartime bombings make another appearance later in the film; in fact, one such image closes the film. In a final shot that mirrors the movie's opening scene, the camera cranes away from the window at which Hester stands, past some children singing a playground song and jumping rope on the rubble-littered street, to an ominous maw that lies at the end of the street, replacing the building that once stood there with bleak, seemingly inevitable emptiness. This ending becomes even more ambiguous when we consider that, in terms of the narrative and Hester's character, it actually ends with a semblance of hope for the future, of moving on with one's life. Maybe, then, the ending of The Deep Blue Sea equates Hester's tumultuous personal traumas with the violence recently undergone by England as a whole: moving perpetually closer towards the abyss, yet somehow climbing through it, finding self-reckoning through the terror.

Despite Hester's name, The Deep Blue Sea is no Scarlett Letter-ish reprobation of a married woman's disastrous yet passionate affair with another man. We understand what Hester is going through, to a certain extent; the movie aligns us so intimately to Hester's perspective that we seem to glean some understanding from her quiet suffering, from her equivocal glances at the world around her. At times Hester seems too good for either of these men: too passionate, too mercurial, for her meek and gentle husband, too self-sacrificing and understanding for the cad who neglects and berates her. But it also seems as though her sacrifices invigorate her, help define herself in her own eyes; in a desperate bid to find passion in a world that's been discombobulated, maybe she does so by leaping headlong into relationships that don't befit her. In any case, Hester's occasionally inexplicable behavior resembles the fragile volatility of humanity more than the cerebral ambiguity of art films — despite Davies' alchemical skill with operatic cinematic style, he's always used elaborate sounds and images to bring himself closer to the people and the world around him, rather than further away.