The Deep Blue Sea (Tuesday, April 10, 2012) (36)

Filmmaker Terence Davies makes really beautiful, interesting and eerily personal melodramas and psycho-sexual dramas. He's clearly inspired by masters of the genre, like Douglas Sirk, but also imbues his films with an organic normalcy that you don't find in some of the great 1950s melodramas, which highlighted physical beauty and colorful technical details, functioning almost like fairy tales. Davies' pictures are gritty and bleak, mostly set in post-war England (Davies grew up in 1950s Liverpool, one of the bleakest places ever imagined by industrial-era people), and mostly dealing with impossible love, the burden of memory, and the general sense of dissolution entropy.

The Deep Blue Sea, adapted by Davies from a play by Terrence Rattigan, opens with a few big crane shots of post-war London, its gray rubble and sad honor made lush by such a classic technique. Yes, these grand shots foreshadow the pain and destruction that is to come, but they also invoke some of the more memorable shots of classic high melodramas (think of the romance of The Wind Will Carry Us).

This is the story of Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a woman who marries an older, more-well established man, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale). She has a young lover on the side, Freddie Page (Rom Hiddleston) whom her husband knows about. Sir Williams lets his wife cheat, because he knows their marriage is already a bit non-traditional (due to their ages), and because he's madly in love with her beauty and mind.

Hester, on the other hand, is uncomfortable with the situation and decides to leave her husband, throwing away his money and status, for the upstart Freddie. The only problem is that, for Freddie, the relationship was perfect when she was a married woman and he was merely her lover; he doesn't really want to be with her all the time, as he deals with his post-war troubles (PTSD, bleak job prospects, poverty). After she throws herself into her lovers arms, she finds that she might have ruined the thing she had going before as well as that which she was trying to create.

The story is mostly told in flashback, after Hester has seemingly ruined her life, and Davies explores the concept and weight of memory in a beautiful formalist fashion. Most of the film is shot, by Florian Hoffmeister, with very low lighting, making most scenes somewhat obscured and muted. This not only translates a sort of warmth and nostalgia, but also suggests that Hester's memories of the events are less than totally clear. Living in each moment, she might not have seen everything clearly at the time, and might have a somewhat overly emotional feeling about them now. There is also an interesting break between moving cameras in the present and static cameras in the past, a suggestion, perhaps, that our memories are very specifically fixed and difficult for us to understand completely.

In the past, with films like The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies used juxtaposition and montage beautifully to tell a story from disparate elements and strong contrasts. The cutting style here is much more naturalistic and human (less artistic), but still beautifully helps to tell the story in a particular way. Davies, more than most other directors working today, uses editing and shot sequence in an efficient and haunting way to tell a story from a narrative point of view, but also from a psychological one. We see jumps from one moment to another, sometimes creating surprisingly strange connections between two elements, only explainable through the character's innermost feelings.

As much as it is a riff on the melodramatic form, the film feels much more set in our world than some of the great works by Sirk and Delmer Daves. It seems to be less dreamy and more tied to our human experience. Those classic films seem to function on pure emotion, even if they have cynical social commentary in them, whereas this one seems connected to our world as a gritty drama. This is really a romantic short story, told in a melodramatic style.

The most evocative question this film leaves me with is whether Hester is a response to the stereotypical trope of women who turn their good lives into bad ones through their sexuality (like Jezebel) or if she is merely a pawn in the bigger societal problem of women necessarily depending on men. Is she pushing back against a system in which she has no rights, or is she a victim of that system? Is it her fault that she got into her complicated relationships or is she just a symbol for the post-war degradation of English (or world) culture.

Stars: 3.5 of 4