FILM OF THE WEEK: Deep End (1970)
by Vadim Rizov 
"How does a foreigner know, for instance, what a particular character does when he is alone?" novelist, screenwriter and film critic
Penelope Gilliatt asked in 1971 about
Jerzy Skolimowski's English-language debut
Deep End (
screening Dec. 16 - 22 at BAMcin�matek). "It seem stirring that Skolimowski should have managed it at all, and that his London should seem so nearly like London when a lot of the film was actually made in Munich, with German-speaking actors in the small parts. The slightly off-note ear, the gaps in knowledge don't so much muddy the film as give it a peculiar asymmetry and lack of repose." Despite Gilliatt's mildly offensive tone of reductive national diagnosis ("Poles often serve an ethic of not seeming to try," she also notes), her question makes for a useful analogy. In the film, Mike (
John Moulder-Brown) is a 15-year-old foreigner to the land of adult sexuality, for whom lust is a stand-alone factor: he's too young to see how it might get tangled up with class shame/aspirations or economic exploitation.
Deep End's his bumpy immersion into How Things Work.
Mike's as oblivious as to why grotesque bathhouse biddies want to feel him up when he brings them towels as he is about why 25-year-old co-worker Susan (
Jane Asher) might be treating him as a cute young boy to harmlessly tease; he takes her every rote flirtation to heart. He's also baffled as to why she might be engaged to a relatively wealthy, boorish dullard (
Christopher Sandford) instead of falling seriously for his impoverished, fresh-faced charm (which is mostly ill-concealed if endearing awkward pubescent antsiness). Mike is not completely innocent of class distinctions or embryonic snobbishness: he's clearly embarrassed when his parents show up, babbling with gauche praise disproportionate to his status as an entry-level employee in a field that's not bursting with opportunities for advancement. With seemingly no friends and already in the process of renouncing his family, he tries to construct a personality out of a relationship that doesn't exist.
There's something about this queasy naive-initiation-into-adult-sexuality narrative that still compels unimaginative screenwriters to present it without irony or skepticism:
Deep End's sophisticated woman vs. immature boy dynamic is remarkably similar to the dismal recent
My Week With Marilyn, where an infatuated young man of no particular note really can't imagine why
Marilyn Monroe just won't up and leave Hollywood for him, a situation presented with zero irony. More appropriate homages from other skeptical filmmakers:
Deep End is
directly quoted is echoed in the recent
Submarine, but Wes Anderson also probably saw it before he made
Rushmore: the Mike-Susan dynamic is close to Max Fischer's well-meaning but destructive obsession with Miss Cross, and both films feature destructive auto damage. Max cuts his (30-plus-years-older millionaire) "rival" Max Blume's brakes, a more destructive variant on Mike puncturing all four of the tires on Susan's fiance's car by placing jagged milk bottle halves under them.
The drab public baths are the sole arena of the increasingly claustrophobic first act; the interludes in a porn theater and strip club mark a rare instance where those oft-depressing locales brighten the tone. The Munich exteriors are a suitably depressed substitute for decidedly non-swinging London at its most depressingly gray: nothing but red-light shows and hot dog stands as far as the eye can see. (Mike keeps gobbling frankfurters while waiting for Susan to exit the strip club, eventually getting one free from the grateful vendor.) Skolimowski's not on entirely foreign turf: bad architecture and decaying urban landscapes look the same the world over.
Creepily, hands-over-eyes funny,
Deep End locates comedy both in the pervasive awfulness of every single location and in Mike's total cluelessness. The notorious ending finds a good use for all those buckets of red paint being used to implausibly repaint the bath walls throughout the film's running time; the climax is an expressionist freakout in a film that's restricted itself to dispassionate black humor up to that point, the better to shock audiences at the end. Unlike
Deep End's successors, there's no moment where a light switch flips and Mike gets it. The hysteria builds up to a level impossible to hold back.
Posted by ahillis at December 14, 2011 11:40 AM
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