Davies: The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

The Deep Blue Sea is an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play of the same name and centres on Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a 1950s London housewife who finds herself neglected by both her husband and her lover. For the most part, Davies’ adaptation is gestural, rather than psychological – he’s not especially interested in Hester’s inner life, or in what drives her to have an affair, so much as the way the affair brings out a new series of poses, or postures. The thing is, those postures remain as unsatisfied by the affair as by the marriage, gesturing towards some new way of being close to people, a form of togetherness that takes place outside of the marriage-adultery bind. In part, that’s because Hester’s – and Weisz’s - postures feel like an organic extension of theatre into cinema, prescient of the camera’s presence in a way that other characters and spaces in the film are not. To that end, Davies desiccates his mise-en-scenes until the camera feels positively corporeal, which corporealises Hester in turn, especially against the backdrop of the London streets, which take on the provisional theatricality of a soundstage, as if the hush just before the last bomb had settled and spread. And, as that might suggest, there’s a strong connection to Davies’ earlier period dramas – except that this is somehow both a period drama and a protest play, apocalyptic and nostalgic at the same time. You sense that what’s ultimately been killed by the war is the regularity or reliability of time, just as Hester finds herself unable to return to the pastness of her marriage or contemplate the futurity of her affair. Instead, she’s jettisoned in a new kind of present, the distended presence that Davies often associates with the discovery and apprehension of cinema. Yet this isn’t a straightforward discovery, or straightforwardly about discovery either. Rather, Hester’s yearning converges with Weisz’s performance in an elegy for cinema’s capacity to speak to inchoate, corporeal protest, protest that dwells in the deepest recesses of the body. As a result, Hester’s no more a character than Weisz’s performance is representational, just as we’re not finally presented with a film so much as an elegaic evocation of coming to cinematic consciousness