World Cinema Showcase

2011 marked the centenary of the birth of Terence Rattigan – and an unexpected return to popularity for a prolific playwright whose once enormously successful plays had long been designated artefacts of the postwar era that they dramatized so exactly. Terence Davies’ film of his The Deep Blue Sea, illuminated by a performance of quiet intensity and subtlety by Rachel Weisz, shows just how abidingly resonant Rattigan’s observations of British anxieties about sex and class have turned out to be. Best known for Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, beautifully stylised accounts of his own childhood amidst postwar austerity, Davies once again savours period specfics and refashions the rationed romanticism of the era’s films. Ultimately though it’s his measure of passion and disappointment, confinement and liberation in the protagonists’ triangle of love that speaks across the decades.