Terence Davies’s films function so completely as works of personal memory that the director’s gift for vividly detailed period recreation turns history itself into mere context for a life lived. This is especially true of the autobiographical first phase of his cinematic career, from his trio of early shorts through 1992’s exquisite The Long Day Closes, but even his later literary adaptations filter the artistic expressions of others through Davies’ interpretative, empathizing lens. The director’s radical alteration of perspective is rendered literally by the major rewrite he performed upon the 1952 Terence Rattigan play The Deep Blue Sea, mostly keenly felt in the extended opening sequence of Hester (Rachel Weisz) attempting suicide and experiencing flashbacks to the romantic travails that led her to this point.
The self-contained sequence is, on its face, one of Davies’s greatest accomplishments. Shots depict Hester preparing to die with such calmly executed work that actions such as stuffing a towel at the bottom of a door or placing an enveloped suicide note on the mantle with care have the eerie effect of seeming her usual housekeeping routine. Cuts occur through long dissolves that mimic Hester’s chemical-induced lightheadedness. The flashbacks that occur as Hester lies down in front of the furnace occur out of order, combining glimpses of her dutiful but passionless first marriage to judge Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) and, at various points, both the joy and encroaching heartbreak of her subsequent affair with the passionate but stunted and alcoholic RAF pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). The achronological structure turns these reminiscences from simply summary into a collage of memory that sidesteps narrative function for emotional directness.
Actress-led melodramas have long been crucial touchstones of LGBT cinema, whether as recontextualized examinations of the genre’s classic entries or as modern takes by openly queer filmmakers (see: Todd Haynes’ collaborations with Julianne Moore). Hester, like Lily Bart from The House of Mirth, permits Davies to explore different characters and social contexts while still exploring his own autobiographical concerns and hangups. As the opening intertitles inform the viewer, the film takes place in “London. Around 1950,” the same general time of postwar hope and doubt that backgrounds the director’s childhood and films about same. If domestic melodramas typically find queer application in heroines forbidden by a strict society to follow their hearts, Davies uses Hester’s romantic quagmire, more a result of her own uncertain longing than external repression, as a loose metaphor for his ingrained sense of self-loathing over his sexuality.
The jumble of space and time that lays out Hester’s love life doesn’t just skip between happy days and sad. Rather, it criss-crosses the benefits and drawbacks of each relationship, as well as the small ways that contentment, excitement, and tedium are in constant negotiation with one another, and something pleasing in one moment can grate in the next. Hiddleston plays Freddie with unflappable childishness that charms Hester to no end when they first meet and the young man does impersonations of military men to delight her. But it is not so much a progression or a revelation as a simple side-effect of that behavior that Freddie, elsewhere, comes off as egotistical, blasé, and irresponsible. At times, Hiddleston evokes a grim comedy of this uneasy balance, especially in an art gallery scene that devolves into yet another argument between lovers, which ends with Freddie stomping off “to the Impressionists!” as he screams in one of the exhibits.
Playing Hester’s other partner, Beale imbues his character William with outrage and wounded pride which speckle the film, but the prevailing mood he emits is one of sadness, not necessarily for lost love but a failure on his part that he cannot comprehend. His reaction to losing Hester communicates his inadequacy as a fulfilling partner and, he subconsciously masks his inability to see why Hester would have left her life of comfort by taking the high road and not making waves. Weisz makes it more than clear why Hester would leave; some of the more theatrical dialogue remains from Rattigan’s play, but Weisz does her best work with careful modulations of her face, whether the pure glee of her meeting with Freddie or the stilted tears of home life with William or, at last, the haggard defeatism of her economic and emotional draining with Freddie. As ever, Davies uses backgrounds, music, and editing as an impressionistic rendering of his childhood memories, but Weisz exerts such total control of her reactive body language that it’s easy to attribute the visual flourishes with her instead of the director.
And God knows the film doesn’t want for splendor. Florian Hoffmeister’s cinematography is thick with London fog and cigarette smoke that has curdled from erotic play to a stale stench hanging in a poorly ventilated room. It produces a haze that captures simultaneously the natural and artificial clouds of postwar urban life, the woozy romanticism of the seduced Hester, and the bleary miasma of the woman’s suicidal inhalations. Davies’ ability to leap time with a simple reverse shot into a character’s internal point of view leads to a number of bravura moments, especially one of Hester out of habit running down into a tube station, where a sudden change in lighting and a swooping crane motion recedes in time to a wartime air raid, during which all those gathered in an underground station sang and joined together in civilian camaraderie. It’s a beguiling scene, indicative of the director’s facility with finding the beauty in traumatic memories, a gift that allows him to recapitulate the film’s first image, of a bombed-out patch of street, as a symbol of hope in the face of misery.
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