La Femme Recommends...The Deep Blue Sea

Old love, new love, true love, unrequited love, doomed love:  these are the many faces of love that Terrence Davies shares with us in 2012's The Deep Blue Sea.  Based on a play by Terrence Rattigan, the film opens with Hester (Rachel Weisz) attempting to end her life.  In this stunning first sequence, we begin to piece together what has led her to this desperate but seemingly very deliberate and conscious act.  Like so many woman before her, she is caught between two men who couldn't be more different.  In one corner she has William, her rich, well bred, perfectly lovely, but perfectly boring husband (Simon Russell Beale, sad, angry, and generous).  In the other corner is the victor, Freddie (a rakishly devilish Tom Hiddleston who shows us how easy it would be for a woman like Hester to fall for him and also why he will never be able to fulfill her the way she thinks he should), a handsome, charming, young Air Force veteran who is also prone to anger and immaturity and addicted to a lifestyle he cannot afford.  After a Brief Encounter (pun intended), Hester leaves William for the stifling boardinghouse where she lives with Freddie as "Mrs. Page" (her husband vindictively refuses to grant her a divorce) where she is alternatively blissful and neglected.  All three performances are magnificent but this is Weisz's film, as she perfectly puts the viewer in Hester's adulterous shoes and makes love an affliction that looks wonderful and dreadful, often in the same moment.

Terrence Davies has a very particular visual style, and you feel as if you are in an old photograph:  hazy and dreamlike, like a forgotten memory. The film looks lived in and the world of post war London is fully realized in beautiful burnished tones, but this is not kitchen sink drama.  I would compare it more to the lushness of a Douglas Sirk film than the gritty realness of Mike Leigh or Alan Clarke.  There is something very luxurious about the way the movie looks even though Hester is living a life where she has no money and she really has no prospects, but as long as she has the conviction of her love for Freddie, the little boarding room she lives in is warm and welcoming (and beautifully art directed, as is the whole film). Memory and the way it is triggered is a device we see often in the film and the flashback scenes are some of my favorites.  Often Hester will go somewhere or see something that will trigger a memory of a time with Freddie or her husband.  For example, after having a fight with Freddie she runs down in the Underground and seems to contemplate throwing herself in front of the train.  But she slowy realizes she has been in this station before, in the war, hiding from the bombs with her husband and many other citizens of London.  The sequence that follow is seamless: one moment we are in the present, the next, the past lazily comes into focus as Hester remembers the sounds of the huddled masses singing an old song which merges with the sounds of the blitz.  The scene is quietly moving for reasons that are not easily expressed; the feeling is something universal even though the experience is Hester's own.  Davies uses music to great effect, including a stunning pub sing along that fades into an intoxicatingly sexy slow dance between Hester and Freddie that illustrates without any dialogue how she becomes obsessed with him and how he sucks her into a completely different world than she has ever known.

On the surface, The Deep Blue Sea is really a banal love story that has been told many times.  A woman leaves her passionless marriage for a dashing cad and not everything is happily ever after.  But I found the film to be deeply affecting because of its exploration of what love can be.  What happens when one partner loves the other much more deeply and truly?  We find that Hester doesn't need Freddie to love her back, instead she finds the strength in that emotion to propel her through the trials and tribulations she faces.  And we learn that it's not that Freddie doesn't love Hester, in fact he does, quiet deeply. He is just incapable of loving her with the depth and breadth that she loves him.  Her love for him is the thing of sonnets, while his love for her is just a catchy tune he whistles in the street.   Even when everything is going tits up (as Freddie might say) and her husband William gives her a chance to come back to him and have a stable life, she can't give up the possibility that everything will work out, that she will be happy with Freddie again.  She tells William "Lust isn't the whole of life, but Freddie is, you see, for me. The whole of life. And death."  The notion that the love she feels is so deep and so all encompassing is at once romantic and utterly foolish.  You want to shake her to her senses but the heady perfume of love seduces the viewer too.  Like so many Hesters before her, she is branded with the Scarlet A and must face the scorn of society and the people who used to be so important to her.  Hester is an interesting figure, because she is at once defined by her love for one man and her lack of love for the other but she is also making a conscious choice, and, in a way, she is a very feminist and very strong character (much like Hester Pryne).  She is willing to give up everything, even her life, for this one thing she ardently believes in: her love for Freddie.  Love in this case is an almost rebellious act of self discovery and in the end it may not matter if he loves her the same way back.  Instead, her love for him is a force that can drive her to euphoria or destruction and whichever way it leads her she is in it for life.  And death.

Julie