The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

Terence Davies directed one of the films that has influenced me most over the last few years, Distant Voices, Still Lives, a mournful, slow film about a working-class family. Many years have passed between that film and The Deep Blue Sea, but it is easy to recognize Davies' style and his sensitive and impressionistic approach to cinema. The initial scenes may strike one as pompous and over the top, but I hope you will not quit the film there. It's a very British affair; subdued, stylish, sonorous, a bit like a novel by Graham Greene (but it's based on a play by Terence Rattigan). And then there's Davies signature attention to music. He uses collective singing as no other director I know, the way the pub singing is integrated into his films is simply remarkable; somehow, this aspect of Davies' movies overpowers me in a way I have a hard time explaining (in one scene, a group of people sing Molly Malone in an underground station; the scene conveys beauty and sadness at the same time - but how the hell does it NOT become sentimental?).

The story, set in drab, post-war London in the 50's, explores the relations in a loveless marriage and an equally hopeless love affair. Davies take on these failed contacts could be depicted as meditative (the sparse use of talk enhances this impression); he shows the meaning of "life goes on", with broken hearts and regrets - but the film also contains a few lines that point out the danger of stoicism of the kind that warns against passion, and which instead recommends "guarded enthusiasm". The chronology is not linear and the transition from one scene to another has an emotional rather than a logical role - I like that very much. A weave of sad events is spun; Davies develops his scenes with a striking emphasis on composition that is neither formal nor "dashing" - quietly heart-wrenching, could be the right word. The wife, Hester, is shown with her older husband, the husband's mother. The tensions in this scene grow and grow, but are never overwrought. Davies renders desperation without trying to make it seem alluring or spectacular; this is the desperation of the everyday, of how life takes us in irreversible directions, how relations change people and how the distance between people may appear almost endless. The story may seem a bit old-fashioned to some, but speaking for myself I was eerily moved by this movie.