See this film: “The Deep Blue Sea” (2011)

It’s the strangest feeling, being with this man. Her attraction to him overwhelms her, almost to the point of making her unselfconscious of her facial expressions. Hester (Rachel Weisz) catches herself every now and then, gazing at him (Tom Hiddleston) with such naked longing that she might well have drool coming out the corner of her mouth.

Women like her — educated, beautiful, refined, and let’s not forget married — aren’t supposed to act like this, feel like this. Women like her spend their lives staying under control. What you realize in watching her face is that this is precisely the state of being that women like her, like us, like me, both desire and fear with every ounce of our beings.

What started this feeling? The fact that he told her how beautiful she is, all those months ago? Or is it a chemical dynamism — his smell, his taste, all of it combines to make her so wild for him?

One night, as she spoons his sleeping, lanky naked body — her face only reaches his angular shoulder — she opens her mouth and gives that shoulder a long, satisfying lick.

It’s so telling, really, that she would try to spoon him. Ridiculous because he’s so tall; their bodies don’t fit together in that configuration. But that’s the way of their relationship: she always reaches out for more, while he only seems there with her about half the time.

That’s the fear, of course. It’s not just that Freddie doesn’t have the same passion for her, no matter how charming he can be. It’s that her own passion feels so boundless, even increasingly so as he retreats. Her passion for him, enhanced by the periods of his withdrawal, goes to dangerous places.

Whereas this relationship unearths new depths of love and sexual excitement in her, it reveals Freddie’s true shallowness. He has no idea what to do with his woman who so willingly enslaves herself to him.

That passion was nowhere to be found in her marriage to William (Simon Russell Beale), the respectable barrister and judge. No matter how much he loved her (and he tries in vain to persuade her that he loved her very much indeed), this new love of hers makes her almost disdainful of other forms.

One time her husband accuses her of feeling mere lust for Freddie. It’s a good guess, but wrong nevertheless. How could he know anything like this love?

At rare moments she regains her self-control. Not just for Freddie’s or William’s benefit, but because it helps her to see the situation more clearly. The situation is a mess. Even in her effort to draw back inside herself, we see the truth: her desire is a problem.

Isn’t that how it always is? Desire causes problems. Especially in women. Women are supposed to be the desired, not the desirers. Women are supposed to appear nicely put together, in clothes that flatter them like the deep blues she wears so often. What problems will be unleashed when she releases her self control?

Academics often speak of women’s desire as a problem that resists intellectualization. What to do with the woman who’s harassed into that affair with her boss, but she falls for him in the end? What to do with the exotic dancer who says she loves sex? It’s so embarrassing, so weak, so much what we don’t want these women to do.

Watching Weisz’s face register these emotions makes the dangers of desire as palpable as I’ve ever seen it onscreen. She has no filter left. It’s not the flashiest role in town, but it’s Oscar-worthy for its rawness. As beautiful as she is — is there another actress more beautiful than Rachel Weisz? — her face startles you with its nakedness and lack of control to the point that you realize she is all of us, she is you and me.

Except unlike the rest of us, she has committed herself to a form of love as risky as it is life-altering and intermittently fulfilling. And when we watch her wrestle with that commitment, we feel how much she wrestles with the problem of her own desire. When Freddie’s absent, her desire lingers and floats around those drab postwar rooms, like the clouds of smoke she exhales — smoke that has nowhere to go except back into the pores of her skin, into the shabby upholstered furniture, into the dark recesses of that depressing flat.

What a gorgeous, thought-provoking film, and such a rich revival of the women’s weeper/ melodrama. And what an amazing actress that Rachel Weisz has become in such short order.