Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea 2011

Davies is an utterly personal lyric filmmaker who moves as swiftly as music from the lacerating to the ecstatic.
--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

The Deep Blue Sea, from a 1952 Terence Rattigan play, takes place in London "around 1950" and rather bridges the gap between Brief Encounter  (1945) and Look Back in Anger (1959).  Davies's
earliest films were in black-and-white, which means he knows how to use color as in element in recreating a period when some were still focused on the war and others were looking ahead, and class barriers were starting to loosen slightly.  Davies's film does what few films do as successfully:  creating a particular period while depicting emotions that can apply to us all.  What is love?:  is it sexual passion, the sharing of interests or ultimately, as the landlady says, "wiping your husband's arse while maintaining the dignity of you both."

At first the flashbacks are confusing, fuzzy images of a past difficult to recall, as a pattern gradually emerges of a couple ill-suited for each other, struggling in a bed-sitting room in a bombed--out neighborhood.  The camaraderie of group singing in underground station bomb shelters has been replaced by singing in the local pub. Both Freddie (Tom Hillerston) and Hester (Rachel Weisz) have been scarred by the war in ways they are barely aware of, until they move in together after she leaves her wealthy husband who had money but no passion, for Freddie, who has passion but no money.  When Freddie forgets her birthday Hester tries to kill herself, angering Freddie, who just wants to play golf.  In the end Freddie and Hester go their separate ways, perhaps having learned something about themselves and perhaps not.