The Deep Blue Sea

The opening of The Deep Blue Sea is amazing. Hester (Rachel Weisz) is attempting suicide, gassing herself in a dingy post-war London flat. From here, we jump around her past, seeing her with her staid and solid husband (Simon Russell Beale), seeing her with her lover Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). She meets Freddie, she makes love to him, she attempts suicide. And this whole non-linear narrative display is accompanied by Barber's Violin Concerto. It is loud, sometimes drowning out dialogue. The fragments of the story are bound together by romanticism and regret in the music.

The cinematic magic here belies the stage origins of Terence Davies' latest film. Based on Terence Rattigan's play, the story follows the three main characters in a patchwork of scenes. Hester is trapped in a suffocating marriage to Sir William Collyer, a judge in thrall to convention and to his disapproving mother. In Freddie, she finds excitement, but it is driven by lust and the need for an escape. As Freddie proves to be cruelly unreliable, so Hester finds herself on the brink of emotional collapse and isolation.

That we are watching a play on film is sometimes clear. However, we can rely on the remarkable actors to carry us through. The plot itself is also absorbing, with barbed twists spiking scenes which seem otherwise static on screen (when Sir William confronts Hester outside her flat from his car, for example). But often Davies employs elegant devices to transform the play into cinema which enthrals, while staginess is banished. As characters argue, the camera deliberately intrudes by jumping between them, so we see them face on in turn. It glides over sheltering Londoners in a Tube station, as Hester recalls the war. And there is the opening montage, with music surging across the images.

Music plays an important role in The Deep Blue Sea. This is apparently the case in much of Davies' work, although sadly I have yet to see more. Here the music makes a great impression, but its use is startlingly restrained. Barber looms large (would Walton have been more appropriate?), and a pub singalong of You Belong to Me melts into Jo Stafford's recording at a pivotal romantic moment. But much of the film is silent. Charged as the subject matter is, long pauses dominate and repress the emotion. The characters are struggling in this silence, and so the music has even more impact.

The three lead actors are captivating. Powerful passions ignite the silence and the outbursts. Simon Russell Beale simmers with suppressed rage; Tom Hiddleston can ably slide from caddish to hopeless in a single scene. But Rachel Weisz impresses most. She appears consumed by Hester's fragile and desperate desire to grasp something human through lust. It is a desire that lies at the film's core, and it is not always easy to watch. This is a steady, classical film and it hits deep emotions with small, masterful gestures.

8.5