pleasure, passion, lust
by Douglas Messerli
Terence
Davies (screenplay, based on the play by Terence Rattigan), Terence Davies
(director) The Deep Blue Sea / 2011,
USA 2012
Although
director Terence Davies admits to some admiration for David Lean’s Brief Encounter, with nods to it in his
new film, The Deep Blue Sea, I would
argue that the two are utterly different in approaches and impacts. Certainly both
films are stories of illicit love affairs in Postwar England, a time when such behavior was
not only—to use the language of the day—“frowned upon,” but was actually
scandalous, particularly for the upper class, to which the heroine of Davies’ work belongs. And
both films end with their couples parting company, leaving, especially their
women, lonely and romantically “devastated.” But whereas Lean’s heroine does
not engage in sex and has little to show for her “romantic slip,” Lady Hester
Collyer (the radiant Rachel Weisz) of The
Deep Blue Sex is a woman of passion whose only link with her lover, Freddie
Page (Tom Hiddleston), is sex. While the suburban housewife of Brief Encounter is a meek and shy lover,
Hester, as her Scarlet Letter-first name
implies, is not only sexually active, but is a passionate woman determined,
despite the mores of the day, to engage her whole being in sexuality. Like
Lawrence’s male figures or the exceptional Lady Chatterly, Hester—as opposed to
the advice of her dreadful mother-in-law—is willing commit herself
wholeheartedly to passion, or, as her husband, Sir William Collyer describes
it, lust. At the end of the day (and the movie), unlike the regretful Laura of
Lean’s work, Hester is fully aware of what she has had and what she will now
miss. Finally, Davies’ work, unlike Lean’s tepid black and white teashop drama,
is a richly dark, color rendering of a cheap rooming house and backstreet bar
which Hester has replaced from her beautiful but deadly boring manor house
life.
That is not to say she is any happier than
Laura at film’s end. If anything, Laura will go on living as the faithful wife
and mother, while Laura will face, perhaps, poverty and sexual deprivation. At
least Hester knows who she is. Her only real failure in life is her attempted
suicide at the film’s beginning, an event which catapults her into the haunting
loneliness she must face at the end.
Far more sensitive, if almost asexual, is
her wealthy husband. He would never go off golfing and forget his wife’s
birthday, which Freddie has. He might never brutally scream at her for seeking
out culture, for desiring to engage her mind as well as her body. But then,
William, would prefer sleeping—as his mother and father clearly did—in separate
beds. He is the kind of man, the son of the kind of woman, who, as Davies
recently comically described in an Los
Angeles Times interview, knows exactly how to spoon up soup: employing the
spoon in the direction away from the diner, into the center of the bowl,
instead of from the center toward oneself (as a Cambridge attendee of Davies’
movies explained to him). The action of the disavowal of self is symbolic, one
might argue, and is at the heart of their loveless relationship: Sir Collyer
has no self from which to love, while Hester would devour life—certainly a
dangerous position to be in after the self-sacrifice and destruction of
war-torn London, an image of which Davies leaves the viewer at film’s close.
The problem with Hester is that she is a sensualist
at a time when the society as a whole has been diminished, individuals
transformed from living, breathing humans into somewhat frightened prescribers
of the principles of life. Passion, as Hester’s mother-in-law has proclaimed,
is a dangerous thing. Even her flowers, which Hester is passionate about, give
her only pleasure, as if that were the best one might expect from life. As the
Page’s landlady puts it, “Love is about wiping your lover’s ass,” of being
there day after day, not worth killing oneself!
In his own way, Hester’s Freddie is also
willing to take chances, determined as he is to return to work as a test pilot
as soon as he becomes sober again. Yet his adventure is one that excludes others
except those of his same sex. And in that sense, although he may be a wonderful
lover in bed, he has almost as sexless in life as Sir Collyer! Here, unlike
Lean’s hysterically loyal Laura, Hester, in the penultimate scene of Davies’
beautiful film, has—again as Lawrence might have put it—“come through,” boldly
pulling open the curtains as she stands determinedly looking out to the street,
facing forward to the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment