The Cinematheque

“Pristine … A sad and strangely uplifting masterwork.”

Chris Wisniewski, Reverse Shot’s Best of 2012 (#1)

The frame-perfect vision of Terence Davies’s early personal films can overshadow the inspired work in adaptation and biography that followed, of which the standout might be The Deep Blue Sea. A decade-long absence from fiction filmmaking did nothing to diminish Davies’s exacting eye for poetic structure and everyday specificity. Davies was commissioned to make the film on the occasion of playwright Terence Rattigan’s centenary, yet he knew how to imagine the project according to his own ends; its opening ten minutes, in which time tunnels to deeper and deeper layers, is just a hint of what the film holds. Rachel Weisz, in a career-best performance, is Hester Collyer, a woman who has decided she would rather die than face a loveless, economically hopeless future. Davies’s final film to be shot on 35mm hearkens to a glowing past—the cold comfort of a marriage and the heedlessness of an affair—but in a way that extends a wise, passionate gaze over its decay and transformation.

Print courtesy of TIFF Film Reference Library

The Deep Blue Sea will be preceded by a video introduction from cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.

Best Actress (Rachel Weisz)
Village Voice Film Poll; New York Film Critics Circle

“The agony and passion of obsessive love and a broken heart are so well wrought here that you’ll wish you were suicidal over someone who didn’t love you back.”

John Waters’s Best of 2012 (#1), Artforum