Daily Archives: Saturday, June 27, 2015

Terence Davies (2011)

Why did I go and see it?   I suppose for reasons similar to those of the woman in the queue for The Exorcist who’s alleged to have said, ‘I want to see what everyone’s throwing up about’.  Critical encomia are being spewed on Terence Davies’ latest and, without sitting through The Deep Blue Sea, I can’t argue with them.  The film opens with Hester Collyer’s failed suicide attempt and a summary of the events that have led up to it, all scored to Samuel Barber’s violin concerto.   This goes on for the best part of ten minutes and is described by Geoff Andrew in Sight and Sound as (of course) ‘bold’.  It might be if The Deep Blue Sea was expected to make millions at the box office but the prologue is safe and unsurprising given the type and size of audience the film’s designed for.  Using the Barber music for so long at the outset shamelessly cons viewers/listeners into feeling there’s emotional depth in the carefully composed images which accompany the music (I think that’s the right way round).   Davies was approached by the Sir Terence Rattigan Charitable Trust to do a screen version of one of his plays to mark Rattigan’s centenary although, on the evidence of his S&S interview, Davies was more attracted to the idea than admiring of the older Terence’s work.  He tells Geoff Andrew all the things he doesn’t like about Rattigan’s plays and what he jettisoned here because it didn’t ring true with his own fifties childhood (although he was only five years old in 1950, when the story is set).  It’s this sort of I-remember-how-it-all-really-was egotism that wins Davies praise for being a deeply personal film-maker.

Jonathan Romney’s review in S&S commends the lack of naturalism of this version of The Deep Blue Sea, likening it to a ‘cinematic opera’ and drawing comparisons with the best-known Douglas Sirk pictures of the fifties because of its uncompromising ‘feminine’ emotionality.  Hester Collyer is in a stifling marriage to an older man – a knighted judge who, in Davies’ adaptation, is dominated by his horrible mother.  Hester falls madly in love with a dashing ex-RAF pilot called Freddie Page, failing to repeat his finest hour in the Battle of Britain in post-war London.  One of the things Davies can do which Anatole Litvak couldn’t, when he made the first film version of the play in 1955, is put bare flesh on the screen, and the slowly revolving images of the lovers’ marmoreal bodies in Davies’ overture are very striking.  They suggest art history rather than passion, though, and indeed the rapturous part of Hester and Freddie’s affair is highly attenuated.   At least in the Sirk movies with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson the masochistic heroine has some moments of bliss:  the mood here is as relentlessly melancholy as the visual scheme (the film was shot and lit by Florian Hoffmeister).  Peggy Ashcroft played Hester Collyer in the original West End production of The Deep Blue Sea:  according to Wikipedia, she hated the part because it made her feel emotionally naked.  Vivien Leigh’s portrait in the Litvak picture isn’t easily separable, in retrospect, from her own mental health problems and the breakdown of her marriage to Olivier.  There’s no such confusion with Rachel Weisz in the role.  Weisz is very beautiful but she has no characterisation (try that test of listing the qualities of the person that the actor is interpreting).  Except in the last scene when she prepares herself for Freddie’s departure and breaks down after he’s gone, Weisz isn’t expressing anything more specific than ‘emotion’.

I didn’t think the time would come when I was nostalgic for a Kenneth More performance but it’s happened, thanks to Tom Hiddleston as Freddie Page.  In theory, it seems hard to believe that Vivien Leigh would be helplessly in love with Kenneth More but his bluff breeziness made his Freddie genuinely inaccessible.  You believed in his immaturity, in the fact that he was stuck forever in 1940 – the one time in his life when Freddie was doing something that he enjoyed and which also helped other people.  Tom Hiddleston gives a baffling performance.  The forces lingo – ‘Old fruit, old darling’ – and phrases like ‘Let’s get some light on the subject’ sound quite foreign to him (and quickly get dropped).   In one (stagy) encounter with Hester and her husband Sir William, Freddie is meant to be offensively, recklessly drunk; Hiddleston merely seems a bit more animated than usual.  Davies appears to have encouraged him to try to give depth to a shallow man and Hiddleston’s eyes keep filling with tears but, since his acting is shallow, the effect is bizarre.  Simon Russell Beale does a great deal with the thankless role of the cuckold.  He gives Sir William Collyer a pomposity and an aptitude for being easily humiliated that are by far the best thing in the film.  Davies has invented the character of the monstrous matriarch:  she is atrociously overplayed by Barbara Jefford but Russell Beale’s reactions to the dinner table sparring between his mother and his wife are worth watching.

Yet Sir William’s suppressive manner here, which Russell Beale conveys with such skill, exposes the incongruously over-explicit dialogue that Davies has written for the scene.   Hester and the older Mrs Collyer are verbally aggressive towards one other; it makes no sense for Sir William to respond as if there was tension in the air when there’s outright hostility.  This kind of nonsense will gain Davies points for exposing the social constraints of the 1950s (which we know he’s interested in doing) – but how can people be as openly rude as this and constrained at the same time?   The same thing happens when Hester and Freddie go to an exhibition of Cubist art:  she’s cultured, he’s philistine and they have a deafening row in the middle of the public gallery.   It seems implausible but perhaps it’s not really as loud as it sounds; perhaps Davies is expressing – in a brilliantly non-naturalistic, operatic way, of course – the intensity of the pair’s incompatibility.  Yet the scene’s punchline shows two middle-aged women looking at the departing lovers in shocked disgruntlement – to remind us how socially constrained people were in those days.

Terence Davies appears to be more interested in evoking particular visual textures of the period (and of cinema of the period) than in bringing to life Hester’s amour fou:  he invests his feelings in shots of cigarette smoke or a telephone box.  The Deep Blue Sea includes, like most of his work, a few bits of ‘community singing’, mostly in pubs.  They seem meant, in this film, not to describe a way of life but to dramatise the situation yet they’re inert.  It says a lot about his approach that Davies has the characters in the pub singing ‘You Belong to Me’ but, for its climax, he cuts to a shot of Hester and Freddie dancing to Jo Stafford’s recording of the song.  In a sequence reminiscent of one in David Lean’s The Passionate Friends (although Davies says it was Brief Encounter-inspired), Hester in 1950 briefly considers throwing herself under a tube train but thinks better of it and opts instead for an extended flashback to the London underground during the Blitz.  The platform is lined with people, eventually including even Hester and her husband, singing along to ‘Molly Malone’.   The camera moves along the platform, picking up each detail of the meticulous period reconstruction. The scene is like the Dunkirk beach sequence in Atonement, showing off the set decoration but emotionally hollow.

There are good cameos from Oliver Ford Davies (as Hester’s father, a vicar) and Karl Johnson (in the much reduced role of the struck-off doctor who brings Hester round from her suicide attempt).  Mrs Nelson, the landlady of the boarding house, is played emphatically by Ann Mitchell.  In what’s meant to be a key exchange, Mrs Nelson (who has a bedridden husband) tells Hester that love is ‘wiping someone’s arse and cleaning someone up when they’ve pissed the sheets and letting them keep their dignity, so you can both go on’.  This moment of verbal unconstraint is Terence Davies trying a bit too hard to make clear that not every word in his script was penned by Terence Rattigan.

27 November 2011

 Anatole Litvak (1955)

Long-lost prints of films seem to turn up often enough and it’s to be hoped that one day soon a new copy or two of The Deep Blue Sea will be found.   For the time being, it’s a great shame that the film is virtually unobtainable and that anyone wanting to see a screen adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play will have no option but to watch Terence Davies’s 2011 remake.  As Jo Botting, curator of the BFI’s Vivien Leigh centenary season, explained in her note:

‘The BFI National Archive contains only one element and, as we rarely project material from the Archive for preservation reasons, we cast the net wider to try and track down a print elsewhere.  Nothing came to light at any of the US archives, or through any of the companies involved in the film’s production. … So, although our ex-distribution print is somewhat faded, with a few scratches and splices, we decided to digitise it to screen as part of our retrospective. …’

I found this rather shocking because I could remember watching Anatole Litvak’s film on television – I realise now that was probably several decades ago. I had the idea that I’d been taken with it then and that that was one of many reasons for disliking the Davies version.  (I’ve never seen the play on stage.)  Anyway, I’m certainly taken with Litvak’s film now:  the print the BFI showed really was in bad shape but the qualities of The Deep Blue Sea were still plain to see.

Although CinemaScope seems essentially wrong for what is a claustrophobic story, the opening out of the play works well (Rattigan did the screenplay).   The location filming in contemporary London – along the Embankment, where Hester Collyer and Freddie Page are living together in a poky rented bedsit, and in nocturnal Soho – is historically interesting now.  Sequences at an air show and in the Swiss ski resort of Klosters are worthwhile too, albeit less for the action in the air and on the slopes than for the conversations there between the principal characters, of whom you never get enough.  Kenneth More had played Freddie on the London stage and is alleged to have disliked filming with Vivien Leigh, regretting that she wasn’t Peggy Ashcroft, who’d played Hester in the theatre.  You would never guess from More’s marvellous performance that he’s uncomfortable:  remarkably relaxed, he draws on his trademark smug, blokish affability to create a man who is at first shocking in his selfishness, and finally very small.  More’s characterisation is bracingly different from the pallid, aestheticised Freddie of the Terence Davies version, played by Tom Hiddleston. (It was impossible to believe there’d ever been life in the relationship between him and Rachel Weisz’s Hester.)  We first see More’s Freddie returning to the flat on the Monday after a golfing weekend during which he’s forgotten Hester’s birthday and missed her suicide attempt.   He bursts in, bright and breezy then puzzled as to why she’s quiet and sad; he remembers the birthday – ‘Oh, Lord …!’   After a bit of conversation which doesn’t brighten Hester up, Freddie says ‘Look, I’ve said I’m sorry – what more do you want?’  In fact, he hasn’t said those words or done anything else to suggest regret.   More is just as brilliant in later scenes when Freddie’s the worse for drink – when the contrast between his RAF bonhomie and his bitterness about the letdown of civilian life hardens into something potentially aggressive.

If that contrast is strong, the tension between Hester’s surface assuredness and psychological disintegration is sometimes almost unbearable in Vivien Leigh’s portrait.  When Freddie comes back from his golfing, Hester’s quietness is not a sulk that he forgot her birthday:  it’s a silencing realisation of the truth of their relationship and that she did the right thing trying to end her life a few hours previously.  Leigh’s Hester, much of the time, suggests emotional exhaustion; as a result, her occasional, always short-lived outbursts of anguish and the gulf between Hester’s present state of mind and her beguiling presence in the flashbacks to her first meetings with Freddie are very moving.  In the flashbacks, Leigh’s soignée sadness is shot through with excitement at the possibility of a life different from the one she’s stuck in as the wife of the High Court judge Sir William Collyer.    This version of The Deep Blue Sea is an example of how fraught with sex a film without sex scenes can be and the lack of physicality in the Collyers’ marriage is just as strongly expressed. As Sir William, an admirably controlled Emlyn Williams blends civility, considerateness and self-righteousness with great skill.  In the moment, during a scene at his Chester Square home, that Sir William realises Hester won’t come back to him even though she knows her relationship with Freddie is doomed, Williams is both utterly defeated and like a child who can’t get his own way – but a child who also knows the importance of good manners.  It’s the fact that he doesn’t give Hester any reason to be angry that helps to make her life with Sir William so intolerable.

Simon Russell Beale too was good as Sir William in the Davies film but the class distinctions between the characters register more clearly and the actors inhabit them more naturally in Litvak’s.  (It’s remarkable also that the man who made the clumsy Anastasia just a year later was able to create such nuanced scenes here.)   The acting style may in some respects appear dated but its apparent limitations resonate with the social constraints of the 1950s that are essential to the story of The Deep Blue Sea – the playing expresses those constraints. Hester’s outbursts are a good example of this:  it would look odd for an actress playing a contemporary character nowadays to switch emotions on and off as Vivien Leigh does.  (It was very interesting to see Blue is the Warmest Colour – and the realism of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s teary moments – in the same week that I saw The Deep Blue Sea.)   But Leigh concentrates so much emotion into so little screen time that she achieves a true intensity; she also suggests that a woman like Hester Collyer had likely been educated not to make a fuss – or not for long anyway.  On the whole, Vivien Leigh is much more emotionally precise in the role than Rachel Weisz was and I think I prefer what Leigh does in The Deep Blue Sea to her legendary performance in A Streetcar Named Desire (her previous movie – although four years earlier).   In Streetcar too she creates emotions of considerable force but it’s as if her sustaining of the same emotion through a succession of lines dominates them, makes the lines less individual.   Her readings are more supple in The Deep Blue Sea.

The role of Miller, the tenant of the flat above Hester’s, is a bit garish:  this ex-doctor – struck off and imprisoned for what one assumes to have been a homosexual offence – now makes his living as a bookie, at a time when off-course gambling hadn’t yet been legalised.  (I would put money on Rattigan’s using the kinship between Miller and Hester as a means of expressing what the writer saw as his own connection with both their situations.)   While Eric Portman’s readings are unvarying, that gets across how black and white things have become for Miller, whose cynicism and isolation allow him to speak frankly and penetratingly.  Moira Lister is obvious but entertaining as another tenant of the house, a nosey-parker resting actress; Dandy Nichols (the landlady), Arthur Hill (Freddie’s pal) and Jimmy Hanley (a pub landlord) all do well.   There’s only the odd melodramatic thud.  It’s a good idea to move into the courtroom immediately after Hester has told her husband of her affair with Freddie and Sir William, the complete professional, picks up where he left off when the court adjourned for lunch – during which time his world has turned upside down.  It’s a pity, though, that, when the court usher hands him a note from Hester confirming her departure, Anatole Litvak cuts away emphatically:  you want to witness Sir William absorbing that shock too before he presses on again.  But Litvak creates a very effective motion picture climax:  Hester, after her frantic search for Freddie in a succession of Soho bars, stands alone, back in the flat on the Embankment.  She has finally sent Freddie away, even when he came back, having lost his nerve to leave her.  Whether she has the courage to live without him is less certain.   She might be considering the advice that Miller gave her along with medication for the night following her suicide attempt:  ‘Take the sleeping pills, wake up tomorrow, go on living’.   Hester Collyer finally stands still because she can stop running around but also because she has nowhere else to go.

26 November 2013