A Jerzy Skolimowski psychosexual thriller – for which a sultry Jane Asher received a best supporting actress Bafta nomination in 1970 – does not sound like the typical kind of treasure to have been, until now, lost at sea. Deep End becomes the earliest film from Skolimowski’s directorial oeuvre to be made widely available. A BFI dual-format Blu-ray/DVD release brings back a restored version of the tragi-comedy tale of two young bathhouse attendants from London.
Skolimowski takes a swim in the deep end of kidulthood with Mike (John Moulder-Brown), a callow school-leaver who petulantly pines after his snarky redhead colleague Susan (Jane Asher) – a young but experienced beauty, bestowed with a curt grace that dwells somewhere beneath the devious surface of her dark eye-shadow and pouty red lipstick.
The Polish director utilizes the bathhouse as a microcosm of Mike and Susan’s sexual world. Mike’s virginal psychology is informed by the seamy antics that go on at his workplace. He suffers from the bureaucratic pains of sexual segregation while risqué poolside flirtations and horny housewives stalk his daily labour. A riotously lecherous cameo from Diana Dors helps stoke the visual image of Mike’s jejune sexual psyche.
Mike’s pubescent frustrations spill over into an infantile infatuation with Susan. She toys with him while they work. Their chemistry is written all over Moulder-Brown’s blushing face as Asher, who was dating Paul McCartney around the time, forms an ideal object of desire – turning foxily from beddable to rancorous with one foul swish of her fiery red hair.
When the working day is over their games spiral into corrupted obsession amid the city streets, brothels and underground stations as the pup follows his catty femme fatale into the seedy depths of Soho. Truly mesmeric scenes are licked with the pulsating sounds of German ‘Krautrock’ band Can, whose 14-minute long trance-inducing track Mother Sky dizzies seductively. The unique sound design helps paint Skolimowski’s foreign perspective of the more unsavoury corners of ‘swinging London.’ Each segment of the composition drags Mike through the ringers of his fevered hound-dog state, which howls from deep within the street facades of London’s darkest district.
It’s never really made clear between what is fantasy and reality, as the Pole explores Mike’s obsession through the intricate surrealist metaphors – of such deliriously enjoyable fusion – that he creates. During the Soho haze, Mike attaches himself to a cardboard cut-out of one of the strip club’s performers that bears an uncanny likeness to Susan. He confronts her, ‘Is this you? Is it!’ The question is never answered because it doesn’t matter how it’s read. Either it is, and Susan is confirmed as the unattainable lady of the night, far too experienced for the likes of the lovelorn lad – or it is all in his imagination; a manifestation of his dough-eyed lunacy.
Much of the films craft is embodied in the foreign object, both as a psychoanalytical emblem and as a vessel of tragically uproarious comedy. As he wrestles to control his rapid adolescent growth-spurt, Mike’s reverie reaches a point of sordid climax. Completely tormented by Susan and her power over his impotent grasp of burgeoning testosterone – the best he can do is to swim naked in the pool with his cut-out cutie.
Skolimowski drops clues, throughout, to the films finale with perfect and subtle precision. A sense of looming danger is aroused by the flashes of red from the warning signs on the bathhouse and city street walls and on the cars, bikes and fire extinguishers that litter the scene. During the enlightening ‘Making of’ documentary included in the release, Jane Asher and John Moulder-Brown share how they thought of the colourful additions to the set as nothing more than odd – until they saw the finished piece. To say Skolimowski waits until the end to reveal his films true colours would be an understatement.
Such painterly contributions have been more his style of recent times having waited 17 years to direct his latest film, Essential Killing, while busied with his work as a successful artist in his own right – generally preferring a paintbrush to a picturehouse. His secondment from film direction has created a blind spot in the history of the Polish New Wave; Skolimowski was one of its leading heralds. The re-release helps ensure that an important director, from within a popular discourse of cinema culture, is not lost in time.
The Pole’s film was originally released in one of the great eras of uncertainty – there can be less doubt that Deep End signifies some of his finest work. The cinema produced is one of a perfectly versioned sense of climax to London’s sexual revolution that must surely be free from any and all critical opprobrium. It’s not a film of bold social significance. It might even be dubbed a largely insular story of desire. Deep End is a daringly adolescent film directed by a, then, young director, who was able to conceive an unflinchingly dark grasp of pup yearning and uncultured raw testosterone – the likes of which are rarely seen in contemporary cinema.
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