THE DEEP BLUE SEA

dMYD

Starring Rachel Weisz

Trailer

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   Remember 1950s Britain, when everyone in the country walked around trapped in a giant suit made of their own repression? Well, you don’t, you’re too young. You’ve got Xboxs, and fake cheeks and trainers made of your own spontaneity. Anything you’ve ever known about the 1950s has come from a series of movies like The Deep Blue Sea, films designed to make you think that everybody in the country was suffering from a love they couldn’t admit, or post-traumatic stress disorder, or thirty-six back street abortions and an overabundance of fish and chips. After twenty years of economic-depression and war-suffering, it was the decade of the cool breakdown, of stiff upper lips and tears in the corner of the eye and a shot of Brandy before breakfast. The Deep Blue Sea doesn’t go anyway towards changing this view, preferring to stick with the clichés of post-war London by wallowing in the mire of long-looks and teary letters by the fireplace.

  On the other hand it does do it very, very well, with gorgeous gas-lamp cinematography and three startling central performances. It’s a play, it was a play, it comes from a play by Terrance Rattigan, and like every other theatre adaptation under the sun it never quite escapes the staid, stationary restraints of it’s dialogue and uber-slow scene shifts. Consequently there’s delirious highs of genius quotes and nadirs of unrealistic exo-speak – it’s a credit to Terrance Davies that he manages to fuse his keen eye for an interior with a decent stab at naturalising the words, helped enormously by having a trio of great actors peddling his lines. The emotions it’s dealing with are timeless, but the shocking originality of it’s naked confessionals has lost the power to surprise after a good sixty years in print, making the movie feel like a museum piece or a simple curio for it’s director. In a world where Big Brother contestants cry if they blink at the wrong time it’s nice if a little old-fashioned to see reserve tempered with shouting matches, to see someone attempting to rationalise their problems instead of jumping straight into an over-emotional nightmare. It’s a fragmentary thing, with glimpses of brilliance and flickers of tears, and all the better for it. Love ain’t perfect, who said films had to be?