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Deep End (film)
1970 film by Jerzy Skolimowski From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Deep End is a 1970 psychological comedy drama film directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and starring Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown and Diana Dors.[1] It was written by Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza and Boleslaw Sulik. The film was an international co-production between West Germany and the United Kingdom. Set in London, the film centres on a 15-year-old boy who develops an infatuation with his older, beautiful colleague at a suburban bath house and swimming pool.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 1 September 1970. Deep End, considered a cult classic, went unreleased for many years due to rights issues. In 2011, it was given a digital restoration with the co-operation of the British Film Institute and was released in theatres and on home media.
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Plot
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15-year-old Mike has dropped out of school to begin earning his keep. He finds a job in a public bath in East London. He is trained by his colleague Susan, a woman in her mid-twenties. Susan is alternately coldly serious and fun-loving. She often cruelly teases the attractive "old-maid" cashier and sometimes Mike. Susan asks Mike, whose job is to take care of the male changing rooms, to substitute for her with a middle-aged female client. The woman pressures Mike to help her undress and then roughly grabs him against her, mauling him, and not letting him go, as she amorously describes men playing football and the player George Best. Mike feels violated by this. He does not want to keep her tip. Susan tells him that sexual flirtation for tips at the baths is a normal way to make money and she'll ask him to switch over when an interested female client comes in.
On the same day, Mike's former gym teacher, a married middle-aged man, visits the pool with a swimming class of girls around age 13. He flicks at their swimsuit straps and pats their bums to get them to jump into the pool, and all the girls laugh and giggle. Susan brings this up disapprovingly to the teacher, as she is having an affair with him.
Mike and Susan start hanging out during their downtime at work. Mike clashes with 3 teenage boys who sexually harass Susan and try to provoke him with vulgar remarks about her. They all fall together into the pool and as Mike is plunged underwater, an imaginary nude woman who is not Susan swims underneath him. It is unclear if this is a vision experienced by Mike. In the boiler room, Susan spies on a nude Mike as he puts on his dried clothes.
The next day Susan and Mike watch as a public worker puts up a pro-contraception poster with an image of a pregnant man. Susan gets a copy for herself, telling Mike she supports the "shock" approach of the campaign. Mike argues until Susan cuts out the face of the man and drapes the poster on Mike, tapping his belly to simulate a baby kicking. Mike laughs and Susan asks him why he always blushes when there's talk of sex. Mike shares that he's a virgin. Susan strokes his hair and suggests that he might take the opportunity to sleep with the lonely, attractive cashier. Later, Mike and Susan are eating on the diving board and he asks to see her home. She says she is going out with her fiancé. Leaving work, Mike nervously passes the cashier as she attempts to entice him. He follows Susan as she meets her well-off fiancé Chris outside. Chris pressures Susan to go with him into a soft-core adult movie theatre. She tells him, "it's silly. It's dirty," and he presses, "You're not going to have one of your moodies again, are you? Come on."
In the theatre, Susan pushes Chris's mouth off her. Mike sits directly behind the couple and strokes his face along Susan's arm. She does nothing. Mike reaches around the seat and fondles her breast, and then Susan slaps him. She tells Chris that a stranger is "touching her up." As Chris gets the manager, Susan kisses Mike deeply and he's overjoyed. The manager and the police take Mike outside but Susan leaves before the police can take testimony.
The next day at the baths Mike and Susan are on break together and Mike brings up her fiancé. She mentions they're going to buy an expensive engagement ring and then go to trendy nightclub. After the break, Susan asks Mike to mind the woman's section. Mike sees his former gym teacher and spies on Susan kissing him. Mike is devastated and sets off the fire alarm to stop the tryst. As Susan and the gym teacher drive home together, Mike rides his bike dangerously close in front of them. When Susan takes the wheel, she runs over Mike's bike.
The next day Susan asks Mike to take care of her customer. He agrees when he finds out it's Kathy, a girl he was attracted to at school. Kathy says she's now more experienced and openly asks Mike to have sex with her and resume dating. Mike says he's grown out of their old scene.
Mike dresses up in a suit and goes to the nightclub in Soho to try to impress Susan but joining would cost his entire paycheck. He goes outside and awkwardly buys multiple hotdogs waiting to spot her. Walking past a strip club he sees an advertising photo cut-out of a nude woman closely resembling Susan. He steals it and while the doormen search for the thief, Mike finds an unlocked door into a bedroom. There, a prostitute with a broken leg gives him a free drink and soon tries to compel him to be a customer. Susan runs away from Chris after he tries to pressure her to go home and sleep with him.
Mike with his stolen photo cut-out finds Susan taking the London Underground home. She's happy to see him until he angrily demands that she tell him whether or not the photo is of her. She refuses to answer, insisting on her autonomy. Mike brings up her fiancé and her affair. Susan shows him a small diamond engagement ring. Everyone on the subway feels uncomfortable and embarrassed. Mike takes the cut-out to the baths after hours and swims naked, embracing it. He has a mental image where he's holding the actual Susan.
The next day Mike jumps into a boys foot race around the track, led by the gym teacher for the school. Waiting at the side of the field, Susan calls over a dog and then hits it with a snowball. Mike rejoices at beating the students before realizing they are running more laps in a longer race. He puts broken glass under the tires of the gym teacher's sports car. Susan goes to drive the car and tires puncture. Mike comes out of hiding, laughing hysterically, and Susan hits him, knocking the diamond out of her engagement ring into the snow.
Mike and Susan collect the nearby snow in plastic bags and take it back to the baths, which are closed, for the snow to melt away in the empty pool. Mike lowers a ceiling lamp and uses exposed electrical wiring to power an electric kettle. The gym teacher enters through an open window and demands his keys from Susan. Susan becomes furious at the gym teacher's condescension and ordering her around and his lecherous grooming of girls in school. She accuses him of messing up her life by taking her virginity before she knew what a pathetic person he was.
The gym teacher leaves and Susan calls Chris to pick her up, making up an excuse why she's late. She accidentally presses a button that puts her voice on the pool's loud speaker, and Mike can hear her. Mike takes off all his clothes, lying naked in the pile of them. Susan comes back and Mike shows her the diamond on the tip of his tongue. She demands it immediately but Mike ignores her. She begins to walk out, but then starts undressing and walking back. He hands her the diamond and turns away in the fetal position. She walks back to him and they have a sexual encounter, which consummates very quickly.
Susan leaves the pool when Chris calls back. She returns to gather her clothes quickly. Mike begs her to stay and talk to him about what just happened between them. He asks how can she just go from being intimate with him to her fiancé, and asks her if sex with him was different than with the fiancé or the gym teacher. Meanwhile, the stoker arrives and opens the valve to fill the pool with water. Mike becomes insistent, following her around the rapidly filling pool and not letting go of her clothes. As she goes to the ladder, Mike impulsively swings the ceiling lamp in her direction. She moves backwards dazed and bleeding and it's clear that the lamp has cracked the back of her skull. She stumbles and falls into the water as the lamp swings back and knocks open cans of red paint into the pool. Mike goes under the water to embrace her, as he did in his mind when he held the cut-out. Water continues to fill the pool, with the live wire dangling within.
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Cast
- Jane Asher as Susan
- John Moulder-Brown as Mike
- Karl Michael Vogler as swimming instructor
- Christopher Sandford as Chris
- Diana Dors as Mike's first lady client
- Louise Martini as prostitute
- Erica Beer as baths cashier
- Anita Lochner as Kathy
- Annemarie Kuster as nightclub receptionist
- Cheryl Hall as red hat girl
- Christina Paul as white cloth girl
- Dieter Eppler as stoker
- Karl Ludwig Lindt as baths manager
- Eduard Linkers as cinema owner
- Will Danin as younger policeman
- Gerald Rowland as Mike's friend
- Burt Kwouk as hot dog stand man
- Ursula Mellin as Mike's second lady client (uncredited)
- Erika Wackernagel as Mike's mother (uncredited)
- Uli Steigberg as Mike's father/policeman (uncredited)
- Peter Martin Urtel as older policeman (uncredited)
- Jerzy Skolimowski as passenger on tube reading Polish newspaper (uncredited)
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Production
Filming
The film was made in about six months from conception to completion.[2] It was shot largely in Munich, with some exterior scenes shot in Soho and Leytonstone in London.[2] The cast members could improvise and were told to remain in character even when a scene was not going as planned.[2] Many years after the film's release, Asher denied suggestions that she had used a body double for some of her scenes; "I certainly didn't! ... And, looking back, I like the way it's done".[3]
Music
The film features the song "Mother Sky" by Can in an extended sequence set in Soho,[4] and "But I Might Die Tonight" by Cat Stevens in the opening scene and finale;[2] the previously unreleased version heard in the film was eventually released in 2020 on a reissue of Stevens' album Tea for the Tillerman.[5]
Reception
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Critical reception
The film received critical acclaim. In The Guardian, Ryan Gilbey wrote: "The consensus when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1970 was that it would have been assured of winning the Golden Lion, if only the prize-giving hadn't been suspended the previous year".[2] Penelope Gilliatt of The New Yorker called it "a work of peculiar, cock-a-hoop gifts".[2] Variety praised the lead actors and "Skolimowsky's frisky, playful but revealing direction".[6] Nigel Andrews of The Monthly Film Bulletin called the film "a study in the growth of obsession that is both funny and frighteningly exact".[7]
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "a stunning introduction to a talented film maker", praising the "delicious humor and eroticism" as Skolimowski "plays with the audience much in the same way that Miss Asher entices Brown".[8] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called Deep End "a masterpiece" that "shows Skolimowski to be a major film-maker, impassioned yet disciplined. He runs an eloquent camera and evokes fine performances".[9] Film critic Andrew Sarris described it as "the best of Godard, Truffaut, and Polanski, and then some; nothing less, in fact, than a work of genius on the two tracks of cinema, the visual and the psychological".[10][11]
Some critics disliked the ending, which they saw as too downbeat.[2][12] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it an "observant and sympathetic movie", but criticizing its ending.[13] Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote: "Although it has a strong and good story, Deep End is put together out of individual, usually comic routines. Many of these don't work, but many more work very well."[14] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote: "Judging from Deep End, Skolimowski has a fairly distinctive film personality, but it happens to be a split personality, split in a way – half-Truffaut, half-Polanski – that I find rather disconcerting and unappealing. Imagine a film like Stolen Kisses turning, at about the half-way point, into a film like Repulsion [1965] and you have Deep End."[15]
Critics also lauded Skolimowski's strategic use of colour.[14][12] In an interview with NME in 1982, David Lynch said of Deep End: "I don't like colour movies and I can hardly think about colour. It really cheapens things for me and there's never been a colour movie I've freaked out over except one, this thing called Deep End, which had really great art direction."[16]
Writing of the film's restoration in 2011, The Guardian's Steve Rose wrote, "Deep End is bravely ambiguous and disjointed, lurching unpredictably between comedy and creepiness; but the characters are bracingly down to earth…In fact, everything about this singular film – the camerawork, the imagery, the soundtrack – feels vibrant and surprising in a way that makes most modern coming-of-age movies look formulaic and, well, shallow."[17] Slant Magazine's Jaime N. Christley praised "Skolimowski's hallucinatory, dissonant, yet compelling tale of hormonal confusion".[18] In The Village Voice, Michael Atkinson called it a "strangely impetuous study of coming-of-age sexual muddle, full of whimsy and abrupt ideas, and intoxicated from a distance, it seems, by Swinging London's free-love commerce".[19]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10.[20]
Accolades
Jane Asher was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.[21]
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Restoration
In 2009, Bavaria Media, a subsidiary of Bavaria Film, which co-produced the film in 1970 through its subsidiary Maran Film, began a digital restoration in honor of the film's 40th anniversary, in cooperation with the British Film Institute.[22] The restored film was re-released in UK cinemas on 6 May 2011 and on Blu-ray Disc and DVD on 18 July 2011 as part of the BFI Flipside series.[23] The disc extras included the documentary Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End and deleted scenes.[24]
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References
External links
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