Our next film - The Deep Blue Sea - 22nd February

 
There couldn't be a better fit for playwright Terence Rattigan than film-maker Terence Davies, in his adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea, one of Rattigan's most touching plays....The film taps into the emotional thrust of the play, aided by an understated but eloquent and finally very moving performance from Weisz that's one of the best she has accomplished on screen....

Davies dares to fillet the play of some of its extraneous characters, and not all the dialogue is Rattigan's. He collapses most of the first act into a 10-minute wordless sequence and occasionally adds his own take on the affair between Rachel Weisz's Hester, married to Simon Russell Beale's High Court judge, and Tom Hiddleston's Freddie, an RAF pilot who scarcely deserves her love.

What he does tap into is the emotional thrust of the play, aided by an understated but eloquent and finally very moving performance from Weisz that's one of the best she has accomplished on screen.

Comparisons with David Lean's Brief Encounter seem obvious. And this, in its own way, has the same feeling for the period, in this case the post-war fifties, and the same sympathy with characters bound by the constraints of the time.

Hester's seizing of the chance to leave her husband is balanced by a performance from Beale which shows what she may have lost. It's beautifully achieved and proves that this very fine actor should be used more in film. Hiddleston as Freddie, a man who has charm but not much depth, is also fine. But the attention is primarily on Hester and Weisz allows us to see the heartbreak that's involved once the first passion is over and Freddie draws back."

Using Barber's violin concerto as his theme, Davies gives us a view of post-war London that includes his propensity for the songs of the time and a gut feeling that almost amounts to nostalgia for how we were then. The film never shirks its essential sadness, despite occasional shafts of humour. In that, it is totally faithful to Rattigan's vision and remains a fine example of how to turn theatre into film." ( Derek Malcolm, London Evening Standard).

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