A deep kind of blue

In a coal-smeary London still recovering from the Blitz, in rooms of hanging smoke in which despair nestles in the wallpaper, in the backseats of cars and back corners of bars, in the lonely hollows of tube stations and the yellow gloom of side streets we find this unnervingly gorgeous, desperate woman struggling to find something to do with the most potent item in her possession: desire. Neither gender has it very easy when it comes to the expression, much less the fulfillment of real longing in postwar England, but the women, those meant to be desired rather than to do the desiring, hold a special challenge (a theme you'll find fleshed out in greater depth by our articulate friend over at Feminéma). 

This is the milieu of The Deep Blue Sea, Terrence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play. It begins, in a sense, where Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth left off: with a woman alone in a room with suicide. This, what we used to call a woman’s picture, is a story of transgression as recklessly valiant as it is inevitably destructive: Hester (a particularly brilliant, courageous, and sexy Rachel Weisz) is married to William (Simon Russell Beale), a judge, portly, much older than she, a mama’s boy, and very tender-loving in a way that has nothing to do with passion. Hester leaves William for Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a lanky former RAF pilot who happens to be a war hero, a would-be bon vivant in silly ascots, a guy who lets a woman know when she gets his engine running, and a cad, neglectful, and not much more sensitive to the scope of Hester’s needs than William. So, if you’ll forgive the blunt language, this is about a woman trying to choose between a man who forgets her birthday and a man who forgets to fuck her. And it’s just about perfectly realized by Davies and his collaborators, at once raw and elegant, generous and merciless: people have their reasons, and Davies finds reasons to sympathize with everyone.

1950s England is also the milieu where Davies seems most at home, the milieu of his childhood, the one that allows him to stage people singing the good old songs in pubs (the director’s favourite on-screen activity). Shot by Florian Hoffmeister, the film glows with mostly muted colours under flickering penumbra—for the first 20 minutes I wondered if the projector’s lamp was burning out—and the elegiac strains of a Samuel Barber violin concerto. The décors, the details in behaviour—the lick of a shoulder, or the bowed head that accompanies the giving of an achingly ill-chosen gift—are all so much of a piece. But I think what I admire most about The Deep Blue Sea is its delicate balance of the subtle and the explicit. Hester’s curtains are freighted with symbolism, and characters actually speak aloud phrases like “Beware of passion.” Yet in the hands of these fine actors even the most on-the-nose dialogue brims with subtext. At its best, Davies’ work exudes an intuitive understanding of the richness of melodrama, that potentially sublime interplay between surface and depth. Even in the film’s seemingly straightforward bookend device we can trace an over-arcing lyricism: in the final shot the camera pulls back from Hester’s window, glides down the face of her rooming house, then down the street, then toward this rubble where there was once a building, and I couldn’t help but notice: that bomb just missed her.

Don't look back: Of Time and the City

Writer, director and one-time actor Terrence Davies in only his mid-60s, yet his voice, while sonorous and formidable, coheres disembodied to the flow of images in Of Time and the City with the withering crust and wearied basement furnace grumble of someone inching up on 100 at least. His is the voice of one whose disenchantment with the world has long turned toxic, who seems to have come to terms the delusional nature of nostalgia sometime shortly following his birth.

Nevertheless, Davies looks long and hard into the past in this, his first documentary and his first film of any sort since his woefully underappreciated Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth (2000), which gave Gillian Anderson her finest role. The subject of this new film is Liverpool, Davies’ hometown. It was commissioned by the city following its designation as a European Cultural Capital in 1998. If those in charge were actually expecting something warm and inviting they must have been pretty pissed when Davies’ treatment was finally delivered. But then they must not have seen any of his previous films set in Liverpool, such as The Long Day Closes (92), Distant Voices, Still Lives (88) and the trilogy composed of ‘Children’ (76), ‘Madonna and Child’ (80) and ‘Death and Transfiguration’ (83), none of which are likely to win the hearts of the local tourist board. The fondest memories shared here seem most closely linked to going to the movies, Davies’ hearty interest in professional wrestlers—one of the film’s absolute highlights—and going on holidays. Davies’ contempt for the postwar Liverpool of his youth is only matched by his utter dismay at the Liverpool of the present.

There is, to be sure, something quite seductive, at least for a while, in Davies’ carefully rendered recollections, a sense of longing that lingers even when caked in disappointment and conveyed through numerous bitter witticisms, one of which is a clever dis to the Beatles that’s sure to get a crackling response from just about any audience. His departure from the Catholic Church and general shedding of faith, his budding homosexuality and gradual gleaning of its forbidding precariousness, his working-class upbringing and the dire limitations it wrought: as he speaks about these themes there come certain emotionally pointed synchronicities between his words and the imagery, much of it archival footage, some of it quite fascinating. Even here there is ample evidence of Davies' particular gifts. He's among the world's best filmmakers who seem unable to make very many films. But this film’s attitude is essentially static, its approach not all that driven by actual questions or curiosity, and Davies’ voice seems almost designed to lull you to sleep while its message diligently grinds you down.

I have to admire the way Davies arranges his selection of images from the past, which thread along with a lyricism perhaps informed by English poetry, something Davies clearly adores unreservedly. Yet the dominant utility of all the new footage he’s cultivated seems to be one of fodder for comments of sarcasm and condescension toward Liverpool’s architecture, civic pride, culture and appallingly dressed people. The pomposity, bile and curmudgeonly defiance do not in themselves spoil the value of the film; the problem rather has to do with the limits of what this inclination can possibly yield after 72 minutes.