Entertainment

Simply shining ‘Blue Sea’

Exquisitely photographed and touchingly acted by Rachel Weisz as the suicidal woman at its apex, Terence Davies’ “The Deep Blue Sea’’ turns the spotlight on a tragic romantic triangle and sexual repression in early 1950s England.

This adaptation of a play by Terence Rattigan — the making of a film based on another of his works was recently depicted in “My Week With Marilyn’’ — opens with Hester (Weisz) turning on the gas jets in the seedy flat where she’s been carrying on an adulterous affair.

Hester is despairing because her lover Freddie, a feckless former RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston), has forgotten her birthday and gone on a “golfing weekend.’’

It’s just the latest indication the self-absorbed Freddie can never love her with anything approaching her obsession with him.

Davies’ adaptation obliquely hints that flyboy Freddie may have sexual identity issues, but he remains pretty much a cipher throughout.

The drama has been squarely refocused on Hester, whose suicide attempt is a cry for help that draws dramatically different responses from the men in her life.

An alarmed Freddie pulls further away from the clinging Hester, who desperately chases him through a series of pubs.

Hester’s humiliated, image-conscious older husband, a judge named Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale in a solid if stagey performance), is at first angry at this turn of events.

Then he’s genuinely concerned about and ultimately emotionally generous with a woman he’s clearly still in love with.

There’s vivid supporting work by Ann Mitchell as the landlady who interrupts Hester’s suicide, and Karl Johnson as an ex-doctor who she brings in to treat Hester on the QT (attempted suicide being a punishable offense at the time).

Weisz’s stoic, sexually frustrated and borderline masochistic Hester isn’t as showy as Vivien Leigh’s performance in Anatole Litvak’s fine 1955 adaptation of the play.

But she does a fine, understated job within the parameters of Davies’ stripped-down adaptation.

His approach is too restrained to produce a four-handkerchief classic like Noel Coward and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter,’’ to which Davies gives a nod or two.

He even deploys Samuel Barber’s “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14’’ in a way similar to Coward’s use of Rachmaninoff in the earlier film.

Nor is Davies interested in deconstructing 1950s female-driven romantic melodramas the way Todd Haynes did so brilliantly with “Far From Heaven.’’

The image that sticks with you here is a smoky pub where the patrons are singing “You Belong to Me.’’

It’s a rare touch of irony in “Deep Blue Sea,’’ an arty drama that works best as an extremely detailed evocation of that bygone era, when a shellshocked England was still recovering from the wounds World War II en route to the sexy ’60s.