One of the more memorable films at the Toronto International Film Festival was Terence Davies‘ postwar romantic drama The Deep Blue Sea. Based on Terence Rattigan’s play, it was a bit dry and I didn’t love Rachel Weisz‘s performance, but the restraint and emotion that came through are its strong suits. We recently posted a clip, but now the full trailer has arrived on I Love Film. Music Box recently picked up the film for US distribution, so expect to see it sometime next year. Check out the trailer below for the film also starring Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale.
Synopsis:
Postwar England has been a recurring and vital setting for Terence Davies. His semiautobiographical masterpieces Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, as well as the bulk of his rapturous documentary Of Time and the City, take place largely in the fifties and movingly evoke the hardship and camaraderie of that era.
The Deep Blue Sea is also a product of that age. An adaptation of a famous play by British playwright Terence Rattigan, it features one of the greatest roles for an actress in modern theatre; Peggy Ashcroft, Vivien Leigh, Penelope Keith and Blythe Danner have all taken a swing at it. Joining them now in an impossibly intimate and deeply vulnerable performance is Rachel Weisz. She plays Hester Collyer, the former wife of a high-WASP judge, now the nearly abandoned lover of a drunken former World War II pilot. Emotionally stranded and physically isolated, she attempts suicide to win him back and perhaps also to send a message to her former husband. Her gesture serves only to estrange her more from the men in her life and reality itself.
Davies cleverly strips away many of the play’s supporting characters and expands the film visually and psychologically into Lady Collyer’s dream life. Gently abstracted flashbacks take us into luminous cinematographic landscapes, including a bravura tracking shot through an underground station during the Blitz. But it is the unrelenting focus on Weisz — her face, her pain — in long, masterfully composed takes that draws us inside her utter desperation and the desperation of the British people, struggling to rebuild their society after a calamitous war and the loss of an Empire.
The Deep Blue Sea hits UK later this year after premiering at the London Film Festival. There is no word on a US release date yet.
What do you think of the first trailer?