The Deep Blue Sea – Impenetrable
Take a respected play, some good actors, a good director and come up with a 1 ½ hour movie that looks and feels like double its length. Director Terence Davies (The House of Mirth) I might have thought worthy of carrying out this exercise - seemed to be having a bad year turning out this lethargic result. Maybe he fiddled with Terrance Rattigan’s play a little too much? I enjoy a pensive period love story but shamefully found myself watching this slog, at times, in double speed! I’m sure some might enjoy this treatment but from the look of the miserable box-office returns not many.

A story needs more than good performances to carry it along and it would have helped if some of the sequences had been photographed without the dreary Fog Filter permanently attached. Samuel Barber’s Violin concerto is lovely but perhaps an unsuited choice for such a dead-slow movie as this. Here we have a woman that thousands of women would ever so gladly swap places with – a well above average, extremely comfortable home, steady secure income - OK little or no passion--but she did choose this marriage herself. She then enters into an affair with a wildly immature, damaged soul, who proceeds to treat her abysmally! - pushing her life into several attempts at suicide...all this time she simply puts up with an un-livable situation. Punish yourself if you must but please spare some thought for the audience along the way.

Hester reminded me of Anna Karenina....& I lost patience with HER in the first 50 pages.....