The Deep Blue Sea: A Tale Told by Two Terences
2012; Issue: 86 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoFIRST COMMENTER: Nothing actually happens in the trailer. I didn't even finish watching the two minutes. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] SECOND COMMENTER: Well, someone falls in love, and then that relationship seems to fall apart. Perhaps that's nothing for you. If so, then I don't think the film's really meant for you. It's not a children's film. --From a discussion on the IMDB message board for Deep Blue Sea, Wednesday, September 28, 2011 Terence Davies, the British filmmaker whose last film at TIFF in 2008 was Of Time and the City, a documentary homage to his hometown Liverpool, this year brought something quite different. Deep Blue (2011) is a very personal reworking of British playwright Terence Rattigan's very personal The Deep Blue Sea from 1 952. With only three main actors and several peripheral ones, Davies' is an unusually 'small' film; small in scope; small in narrative territory covered; small in costs (2.5 million according to the director). However and nevertheless, it packs an unusually large emotional visual and dramatic wallop. Davies has kept Rattigan's central narrative focusing on a single fateful day in the intertwined lives of three people: middle-aged Hester Collyer/Rachel Weisz, her younger lover Freddie Page/Tom Hiddleston, a WWII RAF pilot and hero now out of work, and her older husband Sir William Collyer/Simon Russell Beale, an esteemed judge, whom she abandoned for Freddie 10 months earlier. focus is on Hester: she is the first character we see, closing the curtains of a window in the flat where they live, and she is the last person we see, opening those same curtains. In between these structurally sym metrical and normatively symbolic bookended gestures, the trajectory of the plot leads her from the hell of abject desperation and attempted suicide to an acceptance, albeit reluctant, of the reality of her situation, with its implied emancipation from her obsessive reliance on and need for the romantic love that has had her in thrall. While both play and film maintain the structure of a morning-to-evening timeframe, Davies uses the filmic medium to brilliantly accomplish two kinds of expansions. First, he moves the narrative outside of the play's (intentionally) claustrophobic mise-en-scene of a single stage set which depicts the rather dreary flat where Hester and Freddie have been living. Events that had occurred off-stage in the play are now depicted in situ in the film version. Second, he has inserted flashbacks that fill in some of the back-story details for the central triangulated love relationship. While the play unfolded in a linear fashion, taking place strictly across a single day, the film interjects scenes and sequences in a non-linear manner, depicting past events that serve to give explanatory meaning to Hester's actions in the present. Davies has chosen to use these to amplify our knowledge and understanding of Hester's actions, rather than relying on great swaths of expository (and sometimes moralizing) dialogue, as in the play, especially its first and last acts. While one could reasonably expect that such additions would flatten out and 'dumb down' the film for a contemporary audience, in fact it's quite the opposite. decisions made by Davies when translating the play into film serve to bring a level of complexity to the narrative beyond the limits of a theatrical production, and render Deep Blue Sect a true filmic experience rather than merely a 'filmed play'. One of the most strongly defining features of the film, absent of course in the play, is Davies' remarkable use of music which serves as an adjunct to the intense visual and dramatic narrative unfolding on screen. Particularly powerful is the director's choice of Samuel Barber's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra op.141, its plaintive strains poignantly repeated throughout the film as a kind of leitmotif for Hester's deeply passionate, hopelessly romantic, inevitably tragic attachment to Freddie. …
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