by NEVIL GIBSON
The temptation in dealing with moral dilemmas is to impose views of the presence on the past. Britain in the 1950s was a time of trying to uphold old values amid postwar austerity.
There was a determination to battle on and just cope with what life had dealt.
Sir Terence Rattigan was the premier playwright of the time with hit comedies such as Separate Tables. His plays faithfully observed society with characters who were differential to class, feelings and social obligations.
Apart from a recent revival on the London stage, his work has for decades rested in obscurity, overtaken by the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s’ “angry young men”.
The Deep Blue Sea (UK Film Council), written in 1952, is one of Rattigan’s darker plays and was chosen by director Terence Davies when he was asked by the Rattigan Trust to make a film to celebrate the dramatist’s centenary year.
Davies is contemptuous of the modern and his liking for nostalgia is a reason why many will find his film frustrating in its mannered and portentous style.
It begins with the attempted suicide of a woman, Hester (Rachel Weisz), in a shabby boarding house in a bombed-out part of London. We soon learn she is married to a prominent and much older lawyer (Simon Russell Beale), but has left him for a handsome and younger former wartime pilot (Tim Hiddleston). Her economic predicament — she is too proud to take money from her cuckolded husband — is such that the gas runs out before it can kill her.
Hester is a woman out of her time, putting her emotional needs ahead of a comfortable middle class existence. She also realises the price — financial as well as social — has put her on a road to self-destruction, as her lover is not ready or prepared for commitment. He only wants to continue his flying career, working in glamorous far-off places rather than settling down to a life of much bleaker prospects due to his lack of other qualifications.
The story takes place over a 24-hour period, with flashbacks filling in the gaps and sympathetically recreating the social pressures on a woman whose dreams of happiness cannot be fulfilled.
Davies has made several autobiographical films, including an ode to his Liverpool childhood (Of Time and the City) and the better-known Distant Voices, Still Lives.
He is a master of minimalist cinema and period accuracy, which he enhances through the evocative musical soundtrack (mainly Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra).
Some of the set scenes, such as an acerbic exchange during afternoon tea with her disapproving upper class mother-in-law, are memorable amid the majority that are dourly presented as repression of passion.
Throughout, Weisz plays Hester’s split personality — between a gentle Englishwoman keeping up appearances, and wanton outcast — with remarkable skill that never trips over into melodrama. Fans of Downton Abbey be warned.
Mature audiences; 98 minutes.