The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 18-24
The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
Directed by Terence Davies
Davies films pit the white heat of passion against the icy chill of convention and circumstance, and watches the sparks sail by like fireflies. Lives break apart like the cars of a derailing train, and Davies is there with the unspoken support of their memory to catch them as if they were daisies floating on the breeze. This is how life works, even if it never looks as splendid as through his lens. One minute we’re miserable, then we remember it can get so much worse. Davies’s iridescent framing of post-war London shows not just how badly the English identity was devastated, but how much promise was lost as well. From under the rubble came a return to the same sutured ideals, the same blunted present masquerading as the future. So of course the camera melts into the flesh of two miserable pawns hatching their escape from routine and drawing rooms. It isn’t even their great love (which buckles under scrutiny, too tied to a moment before the bombs stopped falling) but the promise of rediscovery of the self through melding with another body, that our heroine Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) so rhapsodizes to the point of wishing to capture its luster in metaphysical snapshot by killing herself before things devolve any further. Romance is a fairy tale, as the landlady with the invalid husband is all too quick to remind her. True, but what then should she live for? She has known love’s sting. Nothing now will heal that weeping wound. Davies’ ultimate statement on lust and love, and the twilight zone where they become confused, The Deep Blue Sea is a feature-length swoon, a film that knows the feel of the real thing. Scout Tafoya (May 21, 2:30pm; May 22, 6:45pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Davies retrospective)