The Deep Blue Sea

Exquisite, challenging and gut-wrenching… To define Terence Davies’ “The Deep Blue Sea” is as to answer 

"Is it worth it to live your life with full abandon?" In richness, perhaps. In tranquility, an indisputable no. If one could bottle all the expressions of cathartic suffering, brooding crossroads of choices and bitter-sweet ecstasy of passion into one emotion, the resulting concoction would give birth to this film. Rachel Weisz delivers an impeccable performance as Hester Collyer, a young wife of a successful judge whose passionless marriage drives her to a toxic fascination with the former Royal Air Force pilot. Hester is an oozing volcano of contradiction: vulnerable to the sight yet simmering with the strength of conviction. She is a woman caught at the edge of the precipice: cruel as it may seem in her decision yet fiercely convinced in its propriety. The rational all-forgiving husband William (Simon Russell Beale) and boisterous new flame Freddie (Tom Hiddlestone) are the screaming symbols of the old conservative bourgeois world trampled over by the invigorating, yet awfully disoriented new era. What starts as a breath of fresh air, winds down into an overwhelming struggle of decisions, isolation and shame. Samuel Barber’s violin concerto accompanying the film gives this journey of emotional discovery a haunting, ephemeral quality while the painterly vision of photography makes the film an aesthetic treat.