According to his producer, Sean O’Connor, Terence Davies is “like Miss Havisham, in more ways than one.” Immersed in his past, with so little connection to this century that O’Connor thought he was dead, Davies has been celibate for thirty years and is mourning for the love of his life, his mother. Why did this gay, reclusive film director adapt Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, about a woman who abandons her 1950s marriage for amazing sex?
Yet, never having emerged from the 1950s, Davies can recreate them. His Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), like The Deep Blue Sea, replicate the drab houses and bombed streets of his childhood. This film juxtaposes scenes of pub singing with callous brutality as Father bawls “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” over Mother’s howls as he batters her to the ground. Davies watched his mother suffer the same fate. His understanding of women and suffering is at The Deep Blue Sea’s core.
First staged in 1952, Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea is the product of another gay man and his love affair. Set on a single day in a London bedsit, the play opens with the discovery of Hester Collyer’s unconscious body. She has realised she has left one prison, her sterile marriage with High Court judge William Collyer, for another – life with former RAF ace Freddie Page, who cannot return her love, and had gassed herself. As the day passes, Hester regains consciousness, watches her relationship with Freddie unravel, and is abandoned.
Davies is obsessed with the films of his youth: David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). Like these films, The Deep Blue Sea depicts women as desiring rather than being desired, the pains of love and loss, conflict between independence and domesticity. Davies’s film makes Rattigan’s play his version of a “women’s picture,” focusing on a woman’s life and inner life.
Moments from these films surface throughout Hester’s story. Flashbacks to a happier time when Hester (Rachel Weisz) and Freddie (Tom Hiddleston) sing together or dance to “You Belong to Me” mirror flashbacks of housewife Rose Sandigate (Googie Withers) in It Always Rains On Sunday, to moments with a former lover, when she discovers from a newspaper he has escaped from prison. Rundown terraces and bombsites also come from Hamer’s film. The letter from a woman about to die read at the film’s opening, and the scene in the car with the husband forbidding his wife to leave, echo Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Davies’s biggest borrowings are from Brief Encounter; his film could be subtitled “what would have happened if Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) continued their affair with the husband’s knowledge.” To prevent Hester seeming a “relentless, clingy, bore”, Davies borrows the idea of filtering the film through Hester’s viewpoint and memories from Brief Encounter. Recounting Laura’s affair with Alec from her perspective makes viewers share their joy and pain rather than condemn their adultery. The way Hester listens to Barber’s Violin Concerto, as well as its resurfacing at significant moments, mirrors Lean’s use of Rachmaninov, giving a timeless stature to their dark nights of the soul. Most significant is Hester’s second attempt at suicide, this time under a train. The single tracking shot and the flickering lights on Weisz’s distraught face mirror the moment when Laura trembles on the edge of death.
With these borrowings, Davies tries to add to the women’s picture tradition and revive a form that has declined since Hollywood began creating films for young men with disposable income, rather than for women wanting a break from shopping – like Laura in Brief Encounter. Weisz told O’Connor she agreed to play Hester since she had not done a film about her experience as a woman, with her as the main character.
The film’s opening best illustrates Davies’s use of Hester’s viewpoint. He cuts the exposition with lodgers and landlady. Instead he opens the film at night, as Hester prepares for death – shutting the curtains, placing shillings in the gas metre, turning on the gas, waiting to die. As the fumes take effect, Hester’s mind, and the screen, fills with images of what brought her to that point. In one, Hester smiles at her husband, who glances up from his desk, and then the camera zooms in as her face collapses into a frown of distress – recalling Johnson’s face when her character begins relating her tale of illicit love. Next, Hester remembers her first meeting with Freddie. Davies follows this with a circular shot from their naked bodies, to flesh and cloth, back to Hester lying on the floor. By now, viewers are immersed in Hester’s experience.
Davies drops conventional chronology to combine linear time with flashes of Hester’s memories. In a bout of cold anger and childish spite convincingly played by Hiddleston, Freddie throws a shilling at Hester telling her to use it for the gas if he comes home late. As she leaves the pub, she remembers a previous confrontation when Freddie, unable to appreciate Cubism, screams and storms out of the gallery – the memory reminding her why their relationship is ending. Without weighty dialogue or exposition, these recollections initiate viewers into Hester’s story, explaining her wish for death.
Nothing is more 1950s than Hester and Freddie’s restrained parting. Weisz’s face is composed and positive, her voice brisk; mirroring the perfect politeness of Laura and Alec’s final parting in the tearoom. Hester’s “Goodbye”, is restrained, final. However, in the major break from women’s pictures, Hester does not die or return to her husband, instead refusing to return to “living on the plains.”
Perhaps Hester will become a reclusive Miss Havisham, mourning over lost love? Her resolute gesture of flinging open the curtains and gazing over the bomb wreckage to St Paul’s suggests her life will instead be one, as O’Connor says, “of independence and qualified hope.” Whether Davies’s attempts to revive the women’s picture will have the same fate is a different matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment