This is a review of The Sea (2013)
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8 May
This is a review of The Sea (2013)
With no knowledge of the prize-winning novel from which John Banville is credited with adapting the screenplay, one can only comment on other literary features that are apparent, the whiff of L. P. Hartley’s child- and class-centred novel The Go-Between* (also the film of that name from 1970), the feel of Harold Pinter’s troubling Old Times, and of Cocteau’s also troubling text Les Enfants Terribles (and his influence on Jean-Pierre Melville's directorship of Cocteau's screen adaptation). (Not to mention the ring and aura of many Irish actors who have played in Beckettt’s work, or read it aloud.)
The Pinter has a direct link here, for Rufus Sewell, this film’s register-twisting adult male (Carlo Grace), played opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams as Deeley when they magnificently alternated the roles of his wife Kate (reviewed here when KST played her) and Kate’s friend Anna (likewise reviewed – and that on the last night of the run at The Harold Pinter Theatre**).
Where, o where, to start writing about The Sea (2013), as screened at @CamPicturehouse ?
Not derivatively, but a debt to Pinter, Hartley...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 8, 2014
Sewell brings to the part the mix of lightness and indefinable menace that he found in Deeley, and serves perfectly for Connie Grace’s (Natascha McElhone’s) mate, she seeming to be carefree – and open to misinterpretation (not only tones of Hartley, but also of the mystery of childhood for Stephen Wheatley, the narrator of Michael Frayn’s novel Spies (from 2002), who is similarly drawn back to his past). Connie, more welcoming than Carlo gustily feigns to be, does not reckon with the backlash from Carlo’s and her playful high spirits, in invasive yet immersive scenes that we cannot, deep down, utterly credit being remembered aright (any more than the Pinter trio’s competitive claims for their time in London), because (through colour-balancing in shooting or post production) they are tinged with colour, golden light – as if of a Golden Age.
The mixture of fascinated flirting, stark inadequacy / naivety, and simply being in love with this unworldly family of Graces that Matthew Dillon brings to the role of Max Morden has us hooked into what he feels and then tries to think through – without that immediate involvement with his world, his viewpoint, nothing that Ciarán Hinds brings to his stark, rather gruff universe, whose colour (in a Night and Day contrast, especially at the key moment in the drama) seems to have been sucked from it, would move and affect us.
If we are tempted to think that it is a mystery falsely postponed that Hinds’ character keeps from Charlotte Rampling’s, and hers from him, that each knows who the other is, then it is best thought of as an unfolding : as in Old Times, the power is not in knowing (or guessing) the story, but, as always with Pinter (or in mature Beckettt), in the telling itself, the words, actions, nuances.
As also with Pinter, the resolution – if there is one – is on the level of some sort of acceptance. Max Morden (Hinds), suspicious of whether fellow guest Karl Johnson (Blunden) has a real or invented military past, suspicious and frightened, in fact, of so much, and feeling such pain, hurt and guilt, senses that he has misjudged this man. Perhaps, in his heart, he senses that, even if the forces background is a convenient fabrication, then not only have been his own references to ‘my parole officer’ (or maybe needing to write about Pierre Bonnard), but also the stories and confusions with which he has dogged himself / allowed himself to be dogged by through some misplaced respect, reverence even…
The Sea impresses strongly with how it has been shot and put together, no least as a worthy companion for the stunning Calvary (2014) and its own Irish grounding. Not, in that trite way, that the location is another character – just to the extent that Morden, shunning the present, seeks to inhabit this place in County Wexford, and finds that he has the weight of its cruel reminders to bear, borne in Hinds’ terrified expression of being in thrall.
In its way, more alarming for Morden than the demons of Event Horizon (1997), though not, for us, with its lingering mood (or that of Under the Skin (2013)), but rather with a final promise of peace, which could be as redemptive as that of Eric Lomax in The Railway Man (2013).
End-notes
* For no very good reason, a dear friend thinks of it as The Gobi Twin (though a title of some resonance after all).
** That review has, at the time of writing, a staggering 1,302 page-views on the blog, the other just 88… !
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
