The Deep Blue Sea (UK, 2011)
Directed by Terence Davies
Starring Rachel Weisz, Simon Russell Beale, Tom Hiddleston, Ann Mitchell

One of the hardest things to rationalise as a film reviewer is when a director you love suddenly gets it wrong. Reviewing the latest Michael Bay disaster, or Brett Ratner-driven slice of hackery, is pretty easy: simply string together four or five superlatives, add some moral outrage and leave it to stew in its own juices. What's not so easy is trying to explain how Terence Davies has gone from something as inspired as Of Time and the City to such an abject failure in The Deep Blue Sea.Davies' output as a filmmaker has always been an acquired taste - which, in this context, is equally a loaded phrase and a straight-up compliment. Whether you like his back catalogue or not (and even he has mixed feelings), he has a distinctive voice and series of interests which set him apart from the mainstream. He has campaigned tirelessly for the promotion of British cinema, furiously refusing to accept the perceived dominance of Hollywood, both financially and artistically.You couldn't put the failure of Davies' latest film down to him being out of his depth. He has dabbled in period drama before, most prominently in The House of Mirth 11 years ago. But more than that, he has an intrinsic understanding of 1950s Britain, retaining both a childlike fondness of its cinema and a very real understanding of its social problems, which he experienced as a child. Davies has frequently described his father as "psychotic", and in Of Time and the City he painfully records both the realisation of his homosexuality and his disillusionment with religion.One thing that The Deep Blue Sea has clearly in its favour is the way it looks. Florian Hoffmeister's cinematography is lush, glossy and full of rich colours, which somewhat evokes the work of the late great Jack Cardiff. The period details are immaculate, whether it's the costumes the characters wear or the songs they sing in the pub. It's not, or at least it doesn't appear to be, a pretend version of 1950s Britain, either dreamt up by the tourist board or dropped in from Hollywood.Equally compelling is Davies' choice of music. His films have been described as having a "symphonic" quality, which goes back not just to 1950s melodrama but to the silent films which ultimately inspired them. In this case Davies turns to Samuel Barber, peppering many of Rachel Weisz's scenes with those long, elegiac strokes of the bow for which Barber was rightly famed. You won't find the now-clichéd Adagio for Strings sneaking in under the radar, but what there is works resoundingly well.But for all its lavish grandiosity, the big failing of The Deep Blue Sea is something so ironically simple: we just don't care about any of the people on screen. Whether because of the source material, the performances or Davies' approach to either, this is a damning indictment of Davies as a filmmaker. What has united all of his work in the past is an intrinsic connection to the characters - we can empathise with and understand them even in the most fantastical situations. This is the first film which Davies has made in which we have no connection to the characters at all, unless 'connection' can include emotions like contempt, anger and disdain.Part of the problem lies in the casting of Rachel Weisz. Davies said that she was the only person who could play Hester Collyer, and looking at her you can understand why. Weisz does have a kind of classical beauty which recalls Deborah Kerr, and she wears period costume very well. But while she may look the part, she fails completely on a dramatic level, leaving us annoyed by every word and action of hers on screen.When Weisz was performing in A Streetcar Named Desire, she gave an interview bemoaning the lack of dramatic filmmaking in Hollywood. She pointed to the paucity of adventurous drama in a time of obsession with genre, and in particular to a dearth of decent female leads. It's hard to argue against that, but someone urgently needs to tell her that 'drama' and 'moaning for two hours' are not the same thing. Hester does nothing but cry, moan, scream, smoke and stare mournfully into middle distance. Weisz is worse here than she is in The Lovely Bones, so much so that at times you wish her character would just get on with it and top herself.The male characters in the film fare no better. Simon Russell Beale is a very talented Shakespearean actor, and as with Weisz he looks the part as the elderly judge firmly in his mother's pocket. But he very quickly drifts into a stiff-upper-lip stereotype, as the film makes no effort to challenge our expectations of his occupation or social standing. Tom Hiddleston gets an equally duff hand, starting and ending as a caricature, namely the pilot who can't get over the war and return to a normal life.It would be tempting in light of this to put Davies in the same camp as Noah Baumbach. He is guilty of the same cardinal sin of The Squid and the Whale: giving us a film without any empathetic characters, let alone an interesting story. The difference is that Baumbach seems to have genuine contempt for his audience, branding them as philistines if they don't understand why it is engaging to watch over-privileged pseudo-intellectuals whinging about their massive houses and expensive educations. Davies shows no such contempt: he has just mis-steped in such a dramatic way that this would appear to be the case.One could argue that the failure of The Deep Blue Sea is a failure of the source material rather than its cinematic execution. Terence Rattigan's later work, written after the Second World War, is by and large dated and uninteresting. Early-1950s theatre was an empty and nostalgic celebration of pre-war life, with plays which seemed to lack any bearing on or interest in reality. The Deep Blue Sea is no exception, and its celebration of the British stiff-upper-lip feels horribly stale in 2011.While all of this is true, however, the responsibility of making a film work ultimately lies with its director. There have been many filmmakers which have taken average scripts and acquitted themselves perfectly well: either of John Hillcoat's films are reasonable examples. But Davies makes the fatal error of assuming that we should care or be interested, rather than giving us any reason to of its own accord. He plays everything so straight that there is no way in for a modern audience, for whom the wartime attitudes seem at best admirably outdated and at worst totally absurd.The big dramatic problem with The Deep Blue Sea lies in Hester's frustration or repression - something Weisz would know all about from A Streetcar Named Desire. If you're going to show repression, there has to be a pay-off or some form of character development to make all this pressure worthwhile, whether it's a happy ending or a lonely suicide. But this moment never arrives; the central relationship is tedious, unbelievable, and goes absolutely nowhere.The Deep Blue Sea reminds us of two great periods of British filmmaking. Firstly, it recalls the great work of Powell and Pressburger in the 1940s and early-1950s, as they grabbed the conventions of melodrama by the scruff of the neck and produced works of profundity, nuance and visual splendour. And secondly, it reminds us just how important the British New Wave was in eroding these conventions, removing the veils of ignorance, escapism and denial which blighted so much of 1950s cinema.The Deep Blue Sea is caught between the devil and its title, lacking the brilliance of the former and the relevance of the latter. You sit there amongst the tedious story and annoying characters, yearning for Malcolm McDowell to burst in brandishing a machine gun and inform the characters that the world they knew and fought for is long gone. Only time will tell how damaging this will prove to Davies' craft as a filmmaker. It is at very best an admirable failure, being a beautifully shot folly for an audience that no longer exists.

Rating:
Verdict: An absolute and obsolete calamity

Senna (France/ UK/ USA, 2011)
Directed by Asif Kapadia
Starring Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Frank Williams, Ron Dennis

Innovation and artistic value are not properties which disappear when a genre enters the mainstream, and nowhere is there more evident than in documentaries. There are copious examples of recent efforts which have found a relatively wide audience while pushing the genre envelope, from Kevin Macdonald's nail-biting Touching the Void to more introspective works like The Arbor and Of Time and the City. Continuing this trend is Senna, a really great documentary which could be one of the year's best films.Senna is a documentary about the late Formula 1 racing driver Ayrton Senna, which is constructed entirely from archive footage of him. This incorporates TV race coverage, press interviews, TV appearances in Brazil, behind-the-scenes footage and family home video. Although other voices appear over the footage, there is no consistent narration to impose a particular version of events over what we see. Senna is allowed to tell his own story, like he is reading from pages of a diary which switches between the first and third person.One of the instant advantages of this approach is that Senna avoids the cliché of the talking head. These are individuals connected with the subject or more contemporary commentators, whose often platitudinous insights can drag even the best documentary into tedium and mediocrity. But just as Julien Temple's rock documentaries have sought to capture the feel of a band rather than just what people have said about them, so Asif Kapadia makes us instantly immersed in the character of Senna as he saw himself, rather than just the reputations he accrued.Another coup of Kapadia's film is that it makes the televisual cinematic. Normally when TV footage is put on the big screen, it looks out of place because of a difference in aspect ratio or frame rate which breaks the flow. But Kapadia does not let this happen, blowing up the footage very carefully and reframing key scenes so that we zoom in on the characters' faces and emotions. The pace of the film, both as a thrill ride and a piece of storytelling, keep any technical quibbles out of our minds, so that even when the footage is grainy or incomplete, we don't complain.Senna explores a number of themes related to racing driving and the personality and attitudes of the drivers therein. There is a repeated mention of "real driving", the pure sensation of driving for its own sake, in which the goal is not simply winning but winning through pure talent and passion alone. It is this pure devotion to what he loves that made Senna stand out from the other drivers, and which led him to become a national hero in his home country of Brazil.Senna's complaints about racing technology mirror concerns in the sport as a whole, and comment on how the nature of Formula 1 has changed since he started racing in the 1980s. The tipping point comes in 1992 when Williams introduce new suspension technology on their car; at this point Senna's form begins to decline because he cannot adjust his pure style of driving to technology designed to make the driver do less work.

Within this there is a comment on how technology determines not only the style of racing but also the personality of the driver. In the middle of the film there is a conversation between Senna and Jackie Stewart, in which they talk about the changes in technology and how that has affected the flair of different drivers. The implication is the less there is for a driver to do in a race, the less there is for the driver to be, with said individuals hiding behind endorsements and statistics in the absence of real, passionate charisma.This difference in approach is further communicated in Senna's bitter rivalry with Alain Prost. Senna races with a pure spirit and an often reckless urge to win at any cost - he is not content to play the political games and he never does it for the money. But Prost, who is nicknamed the Professor, is content to play those games and drive according to mathematical calculations - if he can win a championship by staying in fifth, he will stay in fifth.Much has been written about how Prost comes out as the villain of the film, and it is undeniably true that at the height of their respective careers both men hated each other. But in fact, their relationship is far more complicated than simple rivalry. Beneath the public scrapes involving crashes and back-chatting, there is some form of mutual underlying respect which these men retained throughout their careers. In spite of completely different styles and attitudes, both men were willing to acknowledge the other's talent, which might explain why Prost currently serves as a trustee for Senna's charity.If we wish to paint the documentary purely in terms of heroes and villains, then the true antagonists are the Formula 1 regulators. The film examines the conflicted and clouded politics of professional racing and how the rules designed to make racing fair and exciting often go against the very things the drivers (or at least Senna) want. In one sequence, the FIA President Jean-Michel Balestre emphasises a particular regulation, only for the majority of drivers to vote against upholding it. In another, there is a heated disagreement about racing lines on the starting grid which leads to a spectacular crash involving Senna at the start of a race.But although Senna focuses on the physical effort and talent involved in racing, an equal amount of its focus is on the spiritual aspect of the sport. Senna was a devout Roman Catholic who prayed to God before each race, and who believed that God had called him to drive this fast and in this way. The way Senna talks about God often drifts in Chariots of Fire territory, so that you almost expect him to say: "when I drive, I feel his pleasure". But the documentary also shows that this relationship was not straightforward; the first time Senna feels God's presence, he crashes at Monaco, throwing away a huge lead and losing the race.Because the outcome of the subject is widely known, certain moments in Senna take on an eerie quality so that they become harbingers of his tragic death. When he goes on Brazilian TV after becoming world champion, a girl kisses him and wishes him a happy new year for every year up until 1993, the year before he died. In 1991 he talks about having many years ahead of him and still so much to achieve. Like Amazing Journey, the film touches on the possibility that certain individuals are so prodigiously talented that they were not put on this Earth to make old bones. And like Keith Moon, Senna's death was both a tragic accident and something to be expected by the way he lived his life.Even if you're not a fan of Formula 1, or particularly interested in the spiritual side of sport, there is more than enough in Senna to get your heart racing. Some of the racing footage is genuinely scary, as cars pass within inches of each other through corners and the on-board cameras give you a sense of speed with wider shots would not. Senna's driving throughout is extraordinary, and in appreciating this we follow his emotional journey. We feel his intense anger at being disqualified from the Japanese Grand Prix in 1989, and both his joy and immense pain after having won in Brazil in 1990 despite having to drive the last few laps in a single gear.There are aspects of Senna's life which remain absent from the documentary, such as his relationships with women and his influence on popular motoring, such as working with Honda on the NSX. But all in all this is a great documentary which is gripping, insightful and highly emotional. It does justice both to the man and to the ideals for which he stood, while leaving plenty of things open to interpretation. Like Senna himself, it is accomplished, thrilling and ultimately heart-breaking.

Rating:
Verdict: One of the year's best films

Of Time and the City (UK, 2008)
Directed and narrated by Terence Davies

There are two main problems with contemporary documentary filmmaking. The first is that the films often become more about the personality of the people making them than the facts and arguments they are trying to present. Michael Moore may be the greatest culprit, but this trend can be traced back to Nick Broomfield’s Driving Me Crazy, in which all the dead-ends and failures of filmmaking were filmed in real time and included in the finished product.

The second, resulting problem is that the vast majority of documentaries end up, in some form or another, preaching to the converted. Environmental films in particular start out with the best intentions and a solid amount of resources, but a number of factors intervene which prevent them from having ‘mainstream appeal’. The subject matter may be too esoteric, the content may lecture the audience, or in the case of An Inconvenient Truth, you find yourself agreeing with everything being said whilst being bored senseless by the man who’s saying it.Of Time and the City should therefore be congratulated for avoiding both traps. Although it is unquestionably Davies’ most personal film, it is not marked by anything which could resemble arrogance or vapid self-promotion. It is instead a film of contrasts and contradictions, examining the ambivalent relationship one has with one’s origins, whether physical or cultural. It is a poignant and emotional examination of ageing, memory and coming to terms with one’s past.Things don’t get off to a very convincing start. The opening five or ten minutes, which feature contemporary shots of Liverpool’s religious iconography, feel very televisual. Part of this might be down to our reaction to seeing archive footage on the big screen – we are so used to seeing black-and-white newsreels in TV documentaries than it is easy to forget they were originally shown in cinemas. But even if certain elements of said footage are cinematic, they are still assembled and structured in a manner more befitting of television. Just as Danny, the Champion of the World suffered from the involvement of Thames Television, so the funding and expertise of BBC Films may explain the uneasy position Of Time and the City occupies on the big screen.The other immediate obstacle is Davies’ narration. Anyone expecting a film about Liverpool to be narrated by someone with a whining, nasal Scouse accent is going to be surprised (perhaps pleasantly). Davies’ voice is one of long, dolorous vowels and nervous consonants, and he expresses his opinions on a spectrum ranging from suppressed fury to jowly mourning via open-mouthed rapture. He resembles an old-school university lecturer, brought out of retirement to teach his favourite subject to a class of disinterested first-years. For anyone too young to remember Wallace Greenslade or John Snagge, it takes some getting used to.

But after this uneasy first quarter of an hour, the film begins to build and you start to get swept up in the images that unfold. There is no central narrative or thesis beyond a loose chronology, which takes us spontaneously from the Second World War to the present day. In one beautiful moment, Davies recalls a childhood memory of catching a ferry on a day trip across the Mersey. He narrates: “people got on board in black-and-white… they disembarked in colour”, and the footage mimics his narration.Even if it were little more than a collection of photographs set to music, one cannot deny that Davies is a skilful compiler. His choice of music and images mesh together beautifully, creating moments of great power in which one enhances the other. In one very poignant moment, he shows a collection of black-and-white images of abandoned factories, scoring them with Brahms’ Lullaby. It’s a tender and elegiac combination, casting a grey cloud of sadness over an already dark time in the city’s history.

Of Time and the City is on one level profoundly elegiac, with Davies mourning or remembering sadly all the images and traditions of his childhood years. There is something about black-and-white which brings out the earthy ruggedness in people, bringing all their crags and wrinkles to the fore. The section of Davies recalling Christmas in the 1950s is very evocative; it brings to mind the traditional seasonal images of Christmas past, without feeling in any way picture-postcard or chocolate box.But more deeply, Of Time and the City is about identity and memory, and how one shapes the other. The film is a cinematic scrapbook with Davies retracing his footsteps, trying patiently to hang on to his memories and to the city he once knew. Late in the film, he mournfully asks what has happened to his city, showing a montage of new housing developments and the changing shape of the riverside. But this is not some boring old fool moaning about the youth of today; this is a man remembering what he had, with mixed emotions, and trying to find glimpses of the good he knew in what he sees today.

Davies’ relationship with the past is far from straightforward, and the film is neither a breathless rant nor sentimental hagiography. There are great sections of him getting angry or expressing disillusionment with what was then the status quo. He lays into the monarchy during scenes of Elizabeth II’s coronation, calling it ridiculous to preserve such a thing out of tradition, and finding it obscene to stage such lavish ceremonies while millions were still on rations. In one laugh-out-loud moment he remarks: “the problem with being poor is that it takes up all your time; the problem with being rich is that it takes up everybody else’s.”On more than one occasion, he expresses distrust of the church, recalling how he discovered “it was all a lie” and calling himself a proud atheist. He even finds time to express contempt for The Beatles. But amidst his bouts of passionate fury, there are also plenty of moments with Davies embracing his past. He waxes lyrical about his love of film, expressing an almost religious passion for cinema as images of Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner grace the screen. He reads from T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets and P. B. Shelley’s Ozymandius like a priest might read from the Gospels: with reverence and a dry sense of humour.Of Time and the City is a deeply evocative film which examines memory, time and identity in the midst of a conflicted portrait of Liverpool. It takes a while to embrace its every idiosyncrasy, and its deeply personal tone may be alienating to some. But it crucially succeeds by not being entirely esoteric, providing a wide range of scenes and images which reach out to the viewer and invite you into this forgotten world. As a documentary it succeeds by conveying its message in an appealing and stimulating way, and by having an emotional core which feels honest and inviting.

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: A moving and elegaic portrait of Liverpool