Terence Davies (2011)
Why did I go and see it? I suppose for reasons similar to those of the woman in the queue for The Exorcist who’s alleged to have said, ‘I want to see what everyone’s throwing up about’. Critical encomia are being spewed on Terence Davies’ latest and, without sitting through The Deep Blue Sea, I can’t argue with them. The film opens with Hester Collyer’s failed suicide attempt and a summary of the events that have led up to it, all scored to Samuel Barber’s violin concerto. This goes on for the best part of ten minutes and is described by Geoff Andrew in Sight and Sound as (of course) ‘bold’. It might be if The Deep Blue Sea was expected to make millions at the box office but the prologue is safe and unsurprising given the type and size of audience the film’s designed for. Using the Barber music for so long at the outset shamelessly cons viewers/listeners into feeling there’s emotional depth in the carefully composed images which accompany the music (I think that’s the right way round). Davies was approached by the Sir Terence Rattigan Charitable Trust to do a screen version of one of his plays to mark Rattigan’s centenary although, on the evidence of his S&S interview, Davies was more attracted to the idea than admiring of the older Terence’s work. He tells Geoff Andrew all the things he doesn’t like about Rattigan’s plays and what he jettisoned here because it didn’t ring true with his own fifties childhood (although he was only five years old in 1950, when the story is set). It’s this sort of I-remember-how-it-all-really-was egotism that wins Davies praise for being a deeply personal film-maker.
Jonathan Romney’s review in S&S commends the lack of naturalism of this version of The Deep Blue Sea, likening it to a ‘cinematic opera’ and drawing comparisons with the best-known Douglas Sirk pictures of the fifties because of its uncompromising ‘feminine’ emotionality. Hester Collyer is in a stifling marriage to an older man – a knighted judge who, in Davies’ adaptation, is dominated by his horrible mother. Hester falls madly in love with a dashing ex-RAF pilot called Freddie Page, failing to repeat his finest hour in the Battle of Britain in post-war London. One of the things Davies can do which Anatole Litvak couldn’t, when he made the first film version of the play in 1955, is put bare flesh on the screen, and the slowly revolving images of the lovers’ marmoreal bodies in Davies’ overture are very striking. They suggest art history rather than passion, though, and indeed the rapturous part of Hester and Freddie’s affair is highly attenuated. At least in the Sirk movies with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson the masochistic heroine has some moments of bliss: the mood here is as relentlessly melancholy as the visual scheme (the film was shot and lit by Florian Hoffmeister). Peggy Ashcroft played Hester Collyer in the original West End production of The Deep Blue Sea: according to Wikipedia, she hated the part because it made her feel emotionally naked. Vivien Leigh’s portrait in the Litvak picture isn’t easily separable, in retrospect, from her own mental health problems and the breakdown of her marriage to Olivier. There’s no such confusion with Rachel Weisz in the role. Weisz is very beautiful but she has no characterisation (try that test of listing the qualities of the person that the actor is interpreting). Except in the last scene when she prepares herself for Freddie’s departure and breaks down after he’s gone, Weisz isn’t expressing anything more specific than ‘emotion’.
I didn’t think the time would come when I was nostalgic for a Kenneth More performance but it’s happened, thanks to Tom Hiddleston as Freddie Page. In theory, it seems hard to believe that Vivien Leigh would be helplessly in love with Kenneth More but his bluff breeziness made his Freddie genuinely inaccessible. You believed in his immaturity, in the fact that he was stuck forever in 1940 – the one time in his life when Freddie was doing something that he enjoyed and which also helped other people. Tom Hiddleston gives a baffling performance. The forces lingo – ‘Old fruit, old darling’ – and phrases like ‘Let’s get some light on the subject’ sound quite foreign to him (and quickly get dropped). In one (stagy) encounter with Hester and her husband Sir William, Freddie is meant to be offensively, recklessly drunk; Hiddleston merely seems a bit more animated than usual. Davies appears to have encouraged him to try to give depth to a shallow man and Hiddleston’s eyes keep filling with tears but, since his acting is shallow, the effect is bizarre. Simon Russell Beale does a great deal with the thankless role of the cuckold. He gives Sir William Collyer a pomposity and an aptitude for being easily humiliated that are by far the best thing in the film. Davies has invented the character of the monstrous matriarch: she is atrociously overplayed by Barbara Jefford but Russell Beale’s reactions to the dinner table sparring between his mother and his wife are worth watching.
Yet Sir William’s suppressive manner here, which Russell Beale conveys with such skill, exposes the incongruously over-explicit dialogue that Davies has written for the scene. Hester and the older Mrs Collyer are verbally aggressive towards one other; it makes no sense for Sir William to respond as if there was tension in the air when there’s outright hostility. This kind of nonsense will gain Davies points for exposing the social constraints of the 1950s (which we know he’s interested in doing) – but how can people be as openly rude as this and constrained at the same time? The same thing happens when Hester and Freddie go to an exhibition of Cubist art: she’s cultured, he’s philistine and they have a deafening row in the middle of the public gallery. It seems implausible but perhaps it’s not really as loud as it sounds; perhaps Davies is expressing – in a brilliantly non-naturalistic, operatic way, of course – the intensity of the pair’s incompatibility. Yet the scene’s punchline shows two middle-aged women looking at the departing lovers in shocked disgruntlement – to remind us how socially constrained people were in those days.
Terence Davies appears to be more interested in evoking particular visual textures of the period (and of cinema of the period) than in bringing to life Hester’s amour fou: he invests his feelings in shots of cigarette smoke or a telephone box. The Deep Blue Sea includes, like most of his work, a few bits of ‘community singing’, mostly in pubs. They seem meant, in this film, not to describe a way of life but to dramatise the situation yet they’re inert. It says a lot about his approach that Davies has the characters in the pub singing ‘You Belong to Me’ but, for its climax, he cuts to a shot of Hester and Freddie dancing to Jo Stafford’s recording of the song. In a sequence reminiscent of one in David Lean’s The Passionate Friends (although Davies says it was Brief Encounter-inspired), Hester in 1950 briefly considers throwing herself under a tube train but thinks better of it and opts instead for an extended flashback to the London underground during the Blitz. The platform is lined with people, eventually including even Hester and her husband, singing along to ‘Molly Malone’. The camera moves along the platform, picking up each detail of the meticulous period reconstruction. The scene is like the Dunkirk beach sequence in Atonement, showing off the set decoration but emotionally hollow.
There are good cameos from Oliver Ford Davies (as Hester’s father, a vicar) and Karl Johnson (in the much reduced role of the struck-off doctor who brings Hester round from her suicide attempt). Mrs Nelson, the landlady of the boarding house, is played emphatically by Ann Mitchell. In what’s meant to be a key exchange, Mrs Nelson (who has a bedridden husband) tells Hester that love is ‘wiping someone’s arse and cleaning someone up when they’ve pissed the sheets and letting them keep their dignity, so you can both go on’. This moment of verbal unconstraint is Terence Davies trying a bit too hard to make clear that not every word in his script was penned by Terence Rattigan.
27 November 2011
