Kritiken

The films lacks naturalism and revels in a fantasy of intimacy, complete with gorgeous sing-alongs that strengthen the idea of community, and slow tracking shots that craft ecstatic, emotional swells. Davies finds beauty in the misery of grey postwar Britain – the film's colour palette is smudged with muted browns and blues, shot through with flashes of warm, Vermeeresque light, and the vibrant life force represented by Hester's red coat.

Davies films pit the white heat of passion against the icy chill of convention and circumstance, and watches the sparks sail by like fireflies... Davies' ultimate statement on lust and love, and the twilight zone where they become confused, The Deep Blue Sea is a feature-length swoon, a film that knows the feel of the real thing.

It would have been nice for Davies—one of the best directors in the world, who has been so since the nineteen-eighties but has for the most part been out of the spotlight—to gain widely what has long been apparent among aficionadi: he's not only a piercingly emotional filmmaker, and one of the great stylists of image and sound (his way with soundtracks and with recorded music and onscreen singing is passionately original) but also a revelatory director of actors.

Rattigan's play is essentially a social whodunit that opens with a desperate action and then spends three acts answering one question: "Why?" Davies answers this question within the first ten minutes. As a result, he sacrifices much of the source material's dramatic momentum. What does he gain in return? Ownership of Hester, who becomes the locus of Davies' pet themes. They cling to her like metal shavings to a magnet.

Emphasis on reflections, and windows create a sense of before & after in every sense—before & after the war, before and after love, before and after happiness. When all that is good seems to be in the past, the choice is to live in it and succumb to it, or to look forward, against all reason.

As in Davies' exquisite adaptation of The House of Mirth, the increasingly grim situation of its heroine is inextricably tied to the particular historical circumstances of her society and her awkward place within it, allowing Davies to both empathize with her tragic plight while longing for the lost world of textures, objects, sounds, and manners represented by his lovingly, meticulously recreated post-War England.

Like all Sirk's heroines, Hester's stuck in a seemingly impossible situation. As the title implies, she is faced with two dreadful, constricting choices: but who represents the devil and who the deep blue sea? Is it Freddie and William? Or is it life and death? At the end, when Davies brilliantly reverses the opening camera dolly, bringing us back to where we started but completely changing the emotional tenor with the subtlest of cues, we have our answer.

One possibly apocryphal rumor states the drama began as the story of a gay man's suicide over a socially ruinous affair in which the lead was transformed at the last second, Lars von Trier-style, into a woman. These resonances suggest Hester's despair is a stand-in for broader social unease experienced by a variety of marginalized British citizens.

It might be tempting to say that Hester is caught between these two extremes—the devil and the deep blue sea of the title—but her passions are crazily out of proportion and may be impossible even for more compatible men to satisfy. She's perhaps guilty of expecting more from men—and from life—than she can reasonably hope to receive.

The movie's first ten minutes are sensational, but then … the play. (Turns out that Hester's feckless lover has forgotten her birthday.) When it comes to Rattigan's dialogue, less is definitely more. Although somewhat trimmed, the big dramatic scenes between Hester and her husband and her lover remain cringe-worthy. Still, Davies' artistry never flags.