The Deep Blue Sea
“Haunting and hypnotic...Rachel Weisz is incandescent” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
“A sublime evocation of amour fou.” - Graham Fuller, Film Comment
“A somber and powerful movie.” - David Denby, The New Yorker
I think most people don't know where the title comes from. A song popular during the second world war (a recent event in this film), has the line "we're caught between perdition and the deep blue sea." This is an apt description of the three protagonists.
“I thought, I know what this one is about,” Terence Davies said at a recent screening of his new film, “The Deep Blue Sea,” adapted from a play by Terence Rattigan. He was explaining why, when he was invited by the Rattigan Trust to film one of that playwright’s works, he had chosen this 1952 tale of adultery and romantic despair. (It was previously brought to the screen in 1955, starring Vivien Leigh in a role performed, in Mr. Davies’s version, by Rachel Weisz.)
This compact rendering — at once feverish and meticulous in its calibration of wanton emotions — proves just how deep Mr. Davies’s knowledge goes. Like most good plays “The Deep Blue Sea” is about many things. It is, in the most literal sense, about England in the years just after World War II, a period of weary austerity and quiet hope that Mr. Davies, born in Liverpool in 1945, has returned to again and again in the course of his filmmaking career.
Rattigan was one of the dominant British literary figures of that era, though his reputation faded in subsequent decades, eclipsed by angry young men, kitchen-sink realists and a flamboyant avant-garde. Mr. Davies, an unabashed nostalgist for pre-’60s, unswinging England — he memorably trashes the Beatles in “Of Time and the City,” his 2008 love letter to Liverpool — lovingly recalls the dust, the chintz, the popular songs and the women’s fashions of the old days. He also has an intuitive understanding of the strong feelings that lie beneath the dusty decorum and constrained behavior before the language of sexual liberation and personal fulfillment (to say nothing of feminism) had entered the lexicon of the Western democracies.
That too is what “The Deep Blue Sea” is about: a woman’s attempt to live by the dictates of her heart rather than the expectations of society. It is also, for both Terences, about a gay man’s sympathetic identification with such a woman — a vicar’s daughter, a gentleman’s wife and a soldier’s lover who suffers like an operatic heroine. And so, to put the matter perhaps more abstractly than such a sensual film deserves, it is about the fate of untameable, irrational desire in a world that does not seem to have a place for it.
Rachel Weisz is incandescent, even buried in swooning, romantic despair. Maybe
that's why the Oscar winner (for The Constant Gardener) partners up so triumphantly with
writer-director Terence Davies in The Deep Blue Sea, a haunting and
hypnotic tale of love gone wonderfully right and wrenchingly wrong.
In the face of Weisz's magnificence, it's impossible to dismiss The Deep
Blue Sea as dated and creaky.
Weisz makes it timeless.
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