The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) [156 points / 16 votes]
"The Deep Blue Sea begins with Hester, a tragically beautiful Rachel Weisz, lying before the hissing gas of an unlit furnace. For some, this opening signals a type of melodrama as dated as the mid-century era the film is set -- a Sirkian age to be eulogized with meta-distanciation, as in Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, but not approached with the earnest solemnity Terence Davies brings to his lush adaptation. What those who dismiss the film as a stiff is the still-subversive notion that accepting what is safe destroys what is passionate.
Hester’s father, a vicar, and husband, a judge old enough to be her father, have provided her a precious life filled with every sensible thing she could ever long for except, perhaps, a child. When her husband, William, asks if having a child would have made a difference, Hester replies “For whom?” A child may not have made her any more content with a dull life, but one may have altered her choice of a respite from it. In a post-war, pre-feminist age, children could become excuses for escaping the type of boxed-in existence exemplified in the film by Hester’s mother-in-law.
The early scenes of Hester and her lover, Tom Hiddleston’s handsome Freddie, focus on their lustful romanticism; however, the majority of the flashbacks concentrate more on the playful, unpredictable, and at times cruel and immature essence Freddie brings to Hester’s life. In one of the early flashbacks, Freddie and his friend are playfully performing a war routine. Hester looks on confused, then enraptured. She is unfamiliar with this type of camaraderie or social enjoyment. This community, more than any other aspect of Freddie, is what draws her to him. It is why, as she tells William, he is to her, “the whole of life.” This, she may believe in the moment, but the film undercuts by showing a sequence straight out of Hanke’s Amour. The landlady is taking care of her invalid husband, and has overheard much of Hester’s drama. “You know what real love is?” she pointedly asks. “It’s wiping someone’s ass.”
Love and its various incarnations are deeply explored throughout The Deep Blue Sea -- Hester’s obsessive, monomaniacal love for Freddie; William’s unconditional, paternal love for Hester; the landlady’s eternal, asswiping love for her husband. But love doesn’t save Hester. Eschewing a heteronormative conclusion, Hester chooses to live on her own. She makes this choice not after Freddie leaves, though she desperately wants him to stay, but shortly before the final confrontation between her detached lover and her devoted husband. After pleading with Freddie to come talk to her one last time, she runs down to a subway station, to throw herself on the tracks. But before the train comes, the rumble brings a memory of life before Freddie. A bombing rattles the underground, dust falls onto the tracks. The camera pans to reveal the bunker this station became during the war. A man begins singing "Molly Malone," and Davies slowly moves the camera in a beautiful dolly shot through the station. The camera stops once it reaches Hester, who is singing along. She is with her husband, but he isn’t integral to the moment.
Though chronologically the first, this is actually the third of three communal sing-a-longs. The first occurs in the film’s present, as Hester runs into a pub after Freddie has found out about her suicide attempt and left her. The voices drown out the dialog, and Hestor is completely divorced from the community. The second song is, I find, the only true moment of happiness between Hestor and Freddie. The two have just made up from an argument, and the entire pub is singing “You Belong to Me;” however, the overly cultured Hestor doesn't know the words. Instead she anticipates the lyrics by gazing at Freddie's lips. Lost in them, the other voices in the bar fade away, leaving only Hestor and Freddy in a slow-dancing embrace. This is the love she is willing to die for, the one that connected her to life. But the memory of embracing life before Freddie and just before the train comes is what she is willing to live for." - Kevin Cecil
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