Hester’s Estrangement: Searching for a Language out of Post-War Britain: Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

Abstract

The premise of this paper is that in his adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Davies reimagines his film, though not exclusively, through the 1940’s woman’s picture, Brief Encounter (1945), thereby shifting a tale of forbidden adulterous passion occurring in period setting to an intense cinematic focus on Hester’s estrangement. The paper thus reads the film per se as a progressive detachment not merely from home, husband and heroes, but more radically from national and aesthetic identity, demonstrating how in the figure of Hester, played by Rachel Weisz, the film opens out from within its very 1950’s post-war texture to espouse the search for a cinematic language and poetics through and beyond domestic Britishness. This semiotic reading, focusing on music, the unspoken, representational slippage and screen memory, thus displaces the question of cultural memory outside English consciousness of the age and outside national boundaries onto stranger remembered intertexts.

Keywords

• Terence Davies
• Terence Rattigan
• 1940s woman’s picture
• adultery
• estrangement
• screen memory