Deep End

John Moulder Brown and Jane Asher in Deep End

Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, from 1971, is a neglected film that verges on greatness. Mike (John Moulder Brown) is a fifteen year old dropout working as a bath house attendant. There he becomes enamored with an older coworker (Jane Asher).  A teasing relationship between the two devolves into a power struggle rife with violence and humiliation. Mike discovers that Susan is stringing along a couple of men and tries to use that to his advantage. The narrative is less a series of dramatic incidents than a collection of clusterfucks culminating in absurdist tragedy. 

Skolimowski's players provide gamey vignettes of English lowlife, particularly a blowsy Diana Dors. John Moulder Brown is callow and thin, but so is his character. Jane Asher was a revelation to me in this role. I've enjoyed her in everything from The Masque of the Red Death to Death at a Funeral, but this is her best showcase. What could have been a forgettable portrayal of a feckless tart is instead a fully rounded portrait of a young woman dealing ambivalently with male predation. I wish Ms. Asher had more such opportunities like this because she was up to the challenge here. 

The production design and cinematography emphasize color to thrillingly expressionistic effect. David Lynch said it was the only film whose use of color he "freaked out over". Deep End's bleak scenario probably guaranteed its minimal commercial impact. Critics were generally laudatory, though some, like Roger Ebert and Gary Arnold, found the film to be too disjunctive. Arnold felt the film was a kluge: "half-Truffaut, half-Polanski." This is a misreading.

Elements of substance in Deep End: color and Jane Asher

By "half-Truffaut", I think Arnold was trying to lump the film in the European sentimental education tradition. Coming of age works like Flaubert's novel or Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films in which a raw youth gains wisdom through romantic experience. However, Deep End's Mike is not a sensitive sort, but a budding sociopath with not a trace of empathy. The clues are there from the film's first shot. 

Deep End, despite its tawdry English settings, is firmly within the camp of Polish black comic absurdism; like Polanski's less successful Cul-de-sac. In literature, this includes the work of émigré Jerzy Kosinski, Witold Gombrowicz, Marvela Gretkowska, Krzysztof Varga and Ignary Kapowicz. In film, this strain runs through the work of Wojciech Has, Polanski and Andrzej Zulawski, whose 2015 film of Gombrowicz's Cosmos is a successful version of a novel that one might think to be almost unadaptable. Certainly the perverse struggles between the sexes in Zulawski and Polanski's work is evident in Deep End. It is not a film in which to find comfort, but Deep End will reward the adventurous viewer.