Now she's trapped in a nicotine-brown bedsit - and in a passion as unfamiliar as the tattered neighborhood outside her window. Ten months earlier, she abandoned her respectable life her and fusty but kind husband (Simon Russell Beale, indispensably dignified), a High Court judge. Hester's neediness confuses him: It's a burden he doesn't know how to handle. No longer a dashing fighter pilot, feckless Freddie is unmoored by peacetime, his rakish immaturity and ready laugh no protection from this new aimlessness. Time doesn't really matter here, though the times do: a country weathering the austerity of postwar rationing, with flyboys and soldiers in rocky transition to civvy street, and the wounds of the Blitz around every corner.

Unfolding over the course of a single day in London, somewhere around 1950, the film flashes backward and forward without hindering its narrative flow. In just those few seconds, we learn more about their relationship than either could put into words.

In one of these, fortyish Hester (Rachel Weisz) watches her younger lover, Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), act the clown in a bar, while the camera swivels back and forth between them.

Over and over, he creates moments so purely cinematic in their mute emotionalism that they can feel like rebukes to Rattigan's carefully crafted speeches. What's left is an almost unbearably hushed study of agony and ecstasy that, in Davies' hands, transcends its theatrical roots to an astonishing degree. Propriety and recklessness make for uneasy bedfellows in The Deep Blue Sea, a shimmering exploration of romantic obsession and the tension between fitting in and flying free.Īdapting Terence Rattigan's 1952 play (originally filmed in 1955 by Anatole Litvak), director Terence Davies heads straight for the heart, ruthlessly shaving extraneous characters and dialogue.

Movsr in the deep movie