The Sea.

                              The Sea. Film Review.

"Solitude is a thing you learn, the knack of being alone. Time is relentless, that helps."

This was Stephen Brown's directorial debut based on John Banville's 2005 Booker Prize winning novel. The film is a British-Irish collaboration filmed entirely in Co. Wexford, Ireland and premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June 2013. It boasts of renowned actors such as Ciaran Hinds, Sinead Cusack, Charlotte Rampling, Rufus Sewell and Natasha McElhone.

The film explores grief and abandonment over three different time lines using frequent flashback techniques to connect with the distant past, the recent past and the present. We see the young Max Morden as a 12 year old during a vacation spent in Ballygarrett, a middle aged Morden (Hinds: Road to Perdition, Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrow Part 2) when his wife Anna (Sinead Cusack) is diagnosed with terminal cancer and the present which represents Morden revisiting a scene of excitement, sexual awakening and tragedy. Highly significant and disturbing.

Morden chooses to visit Ballygarrett after Anna's death. He is uncertain of his motive and admits this to Miss Rose Vavassour (Charlotte Rampling: The Duchess 2008,The Eye of the Storm2011 and Season 2 Broadchurch 2015). His daughter Claire (Ruth Bradley) drives him to the boarding house where he plans to stay, but reluctantly so. He knows it's hopeless but he still goes: "Fleeing one's sadness by revisiting the scene of an old one doesn't work." It makes you wonder why he needs to return here. "This is ridiculous," Claire tells him, "The past is the past. You can't go back to it."

Morden copes badly with news of Anna's death sentence and feels stranded, completely deserted. He is an art historian although he calls himself a dilettante and he travels light when he arrives; research on the French painter Pierre Bonnard does not prove to be the distraction he needs from his grief and loss. Inevitably, it is the booze that temporarily numbs the pain and we see Morden frequenting The Schooner until he is barred for violent behaviour and drunkeness.

The boarding house and the owner, Vavassour have strong links with Morden's past. Her appearance suggests a 1920-30s style, Bohemian with a sophisticated and an aloof air about her. She is a lover of solitude and the reasons become obvious as the film draws to a close. The boarding house is significant because this is where the unconventional clan of Graces stayed during the summer when young Max was 12. Max was from a working class family, simple Irish folk who rented a chalet. He was excited the first time he saw this Bohemian family on the beach and was drawn into their exciting fold, being adopted as one of the family especially by Connie (McElhone) who knocks back bottle upon bottle of vino, squealing excitedly, playing hide-and-seek and leaving the terrible twins, Chloe and Myles to an inexperienced and incompetent nanny who seems infatuated with Connie and suspicious of young Max. The twin were volatile, ill-disciplined and down-right rude and offensive. However, this was all the more exciting for young Max who seems to have been sheltered. Connie enchants him physically with her warmth and sensuality although his growing sexual awareness is because of precocious Chloe who has the knack of manipulating his feelings to suit her pleasure.

When she informs a besotted young Max that the holiday is coming to an end she is ruthless with him and acts in an Estella-like way as if he was unimportant and would be quickly forgotten. The poor lad is devastated. We also experience Chloe's unstable mind when she observes the nanny reading, close to the shore, wishing she would drown.               

                                       

The adult Morden constantly resurrects images of Anna's dying moments as well as remembering that summer vacation with the Graces. He laments Anna's passing to his daughter: "This wasn't supposed to happen to us. Your mother and me. Misfortune, sickness, early death only happens to the good folk, the humble ones, the salt of the earth, not to Anna and me." He admits to Miss Vavassour that they "rubbed along the way people do" when asked if his marriage had been happy. Rather evasive. Yet his grief is real. Even Anna asked the same question before she died. "Happy beyond words," had been his response. When she then asks suspiciously: "You wouldn't lie to me?" he laughs, on one of the few occasions and then tells her: "Of course I would." Regardless of how happy a marriage they had, her death devastates him and this is the reason why he turns to the bottle to survive until his parole officer takes him away.

The beach is obviously the central location with frequent images of the sea, with waves rolling towards the shore-line, where past and present combine to show us the powerfulness of nature, the frailty of mankind and the potential for doom and gloom. It's also the place where a drunken Max stumbles, falling into the water and lying there inert, at the mercy of the sea. The abrupt end to young Max's childhood is more akin to a Susan Hill tale, or even George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, filled with horror and shocking to the core. Now you'll have to watch it, won't you?

To maintain a mournful, soul-searching mood tune into the music of the violin virtuoso, Hilary Hahn, a recurrent motif, simply appropriate and moving.

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

Copyright 2015. Permission must be obtained from the author before any of this article review is published.