The Deep Blue Sea

Terence Davies's new film, The Deep Blue Sea, based on a play by Terence Rattigan, receives a special preview screening tonight at BAM, followed by a Q&A with Davies and star Rachel Weisz. It is his first narrative feature since The House of Mirth in 2000. This is my most eagerly anticipated film of the year so far, since I consider Davies the greatest working British director and one of the greatest, period. The Long Day Closes, his masterpiece from 1992, which will have a week-long revival soon at Film Forum, is on my list of the 10 best films of all time. Davies uses a very precise, hypnotic visual and musical style to pull the viewer into impressionistic narratives of remembrance and loss. He is the Antonioni of British repression and bittersweet memory.

UPDATE 4/3:  One of the best pieces I've read about Terence Davies is by Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope online. It describes the remarkable contradictions between Davies's radical formalism and his very conservative political worldview, which is complicated by class loyalty, his ambivalence about his homosexuality, and his identification with transgressive female protagonists. He says, "Davies is quite obviously an artist at odds with both his times and with what it means to be part of a marginalized group, systematically excluded from absolute belonging with the dominant culture. It is this anxious dislocation, I believe, that makes his films so deeply humane, and The Deep Blue Sea is no exception."

I will be considering Sicinski's ideas when I see The Long Day Closes, my favorite Davies film, again tonight at Film Forum.