A Sublime, Impressionistic ‘Deep Blue Sea’

Terence Davies’ films aim for and often achieve a state of music, the camerawork in harmony with the soundtrack, the images connected by emotion rather than narrative.

Adapting Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea, he throws out the drama’s tidy structure and much of the dialogue, and shows the events through the eyes of the adulterous Lady Hester Collyer, played by Rachel Weisz.

It’s 1950, but parts of London are still in rubble from the Blitz of a decade before, and the emotional rubble is nearly as stark. In the long, mysterious opening shot, the camera begins on a street dead-ended by debris, pivots and glides to show Hester’s boarding house, then rises and moves in on a window from which she peers out. In a series of fade-ins and fade-outs, she closes the curtains, puts towels in the crack below the door and feeds coins into the gas meter. She means to die. As she lies down to wait for the end, the memories come, flashbacks depicting how she got to this grim place.