![]() ![]() We now see in Davies's film what might have been, had Celia Johnson's character in Brief Encounter taken off with a Jimmy Porter figure, a self-loathing, insensitive narcissist. Davies leaves it there as he directs us to observe The Deep Blue Sea as a link between Brief Encounter, which appeared just as the second world war ended, and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which supposedly introduced a new, angry, less repressed Britain in 1956. There is a gay subtext in Rattigan's play, but it is subtly buried. If Sir William is the deep blue sea of the chilly but kindly British establishment, Freddie, with his passion for sport, his drinking, his devotion to fading military glory, is its devilish other face, the physically fulfilling, misogynistic philistine. A montage then establishes the frustrated life of Hester (Rachel Weisz) at home with her unresponsive husband (Simon Russell Beale), her meeting with the dashing Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), their passionate love-making and the writing of the suicide letter, which later falls into Freddie's hands with disastrous consequences.ĭavies drops conventional chronology to give us moments from Hester's life such as her meetings with the overbearing mother-in-law to whom her husband is in thrall. This sequence first creates a lifeless early morning in a 1950 Ladbroke Grove cul-de-sac that looks a lot like the murderer John Christie's killing field at Rillington Place. This is perhaps best expressed in Rattigan's plays The Browning Version, Separate Tables and The Deep Blue Sea, all filmed in the 1950s, but none with such love, attention and understanding as Davies brings to his present task.ĭavies has skilfully reworked the play, cutting it up into a number of short scenes, beginning with a quarter of an hour almost without dialogue. Despite the difference in age and background (Rattigan upper middle class, home counties, Church of England Davies working class, northern, Catholic), they have much in common: being gay, having a deep attachment to England, a sympathetic understanding of women and a stoical sense of living with and making the uncomplaining best of the hand life has dealt you. His outstanding new movie, The Deep Blue Sea, is a version of a play by Terence Rattigan, who died in 1977 aged 66, Davies's present age. Davies's last film, Of Time and the City (2008), was a withering documentary about the sad decline of his hometown, Liverpool, and it followed two feature pictures adapted from American novels set at different times and in different American milieux, John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. This puts him in the same exclusive league for low output and high quality as his contemporary, Terrence Malick. If we count his first three short films made on shoestring budgets between 19 as a trilogy, and his next, Distant Voices, Still Lives, as a diptych (they were actually made separately), Terence Davies has directed a mere seven films in 35 years.
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