![]() ![]() They evoke the London that has left Hester, Freddie and Sir William, where we find them today. These songs draw lonely people together in small solace. Another is a night in a crowded pub where the clients all sing together: "You Belong to Me," the Jo Stafford song that advised departing soldiers to "see the pyramids along the Nile," but remember who they belong to and where they must return. A soldier stood on the platform and sang "Molly Malone" in the silence. One is a memory of Hester's, when she dashed down into an Underground station during a German raid, and Londoners were huddled together forlornly in the cold. ![]() In "The Deep Blue Sea," he creates two luminous scenes. For Davies, his own life and this unreal city must be joined together. During my first visit there in 1962, I was surprised to see whole city blocks still boarded off to block the view of bomb craters. The vast metropolis was the scene of greatness during World War II, but a few years later, it is drab, hungry and without optimism. The film feels pity for the exhausted city of London. ![]() Pity for herself, who has failed to please either man and has found that not even passion is any help for her. Pity for Sir William, who will never make his mother (and therefore his wife) happy. Pity for Freddie, who has lost his purpose in life. Her attempt may have been inspired by pity. ![]() Though Freddie has been neglectful and Sir William is feckless, even she laughs at the notion that anyone has "driven" her to suicide. Nobody has been cruel to her, except for the witch Mrs. Her days, at least the one in the film, are passed in Freddie's musty brown bed-sitter with a gas fire, which she uses early on that same day to attempt suicide. Freddie, however, brings great passion to her bed, but a fellow can't subsist on passion alone, and recently he has been neglecting Hester for the more reliable pastimes of drinking and golf. There are signs that Hester is fond of Sir William and indications that he was a non-starter at marital relations. Every word, every gesture, every intonation of his mother's conversation is designed to exhibit rejection and contempt for her daughter-in-law, and we imagine Sir William himself has been a disappointment to this implacable woman. Sir William must be a deeply unhappy man, judging by a painful flashback scene where he dines with his wife and his mother ( Barbara Jefford). There's something helpless about Freddie that appeals to Hester, whose husband, with his carefully trimmed beard, expensive suits and chauffeured Rolls-Royce, seems forbiddingly stable. He is Freddie Page ( Tom Hiddleston), an RAF pilot whose usefulness ended with the war. The story all takes place on a single day some 10 months after she left her husband for a young lover. His film is based on a play by Terence Rattigan, a playwright born 100 years ago this year, which tells the story of Hester Collyer ( Rachel Weisz), an attractive but inward young woman who is married to Sir William Collyer ( Simon Russell Beale), a judge much her senior. He is about 66, so grew up in the postwar years of scarcity and rationing, when it was said British recipes all advised "boil until gray." It is also the cityscape of his autobiographical dramas "Distant Voices, Still Lives" (1988) and "The Long Day Closes" (1992), and his 2008 documentary " Of Time and the City," about Liverpool, the city of his birth. This is the London of Terence Davies' "The Deep Blue Sea," set "around 1950," when the damage of wartime bombs still leaves buildings naked to the sky. ![]()
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