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.

Riders of Justice

Mads Mikkelsen is, as usual, fighting mad in Riders of Justice

One of the more pleasant surprises of 2021, Anders Thomas Jensen's Riders of Justice is a thriller with unexpected reservoirs of heart and humor. Mads Mikkelsen brings his stone faced talents to bear as a career soldier whose wife dies in a suspicious train wreck. A motley band of outsiders aid him in his mission of revenge and become a surrogate family to the wounded warrior. If anything, Riders of Justice functions as a critique of more simple minded revenge flicks. Riders of Justice contains rich characterizations and a tonal variety that recalls the best of Jonathan Demme and Aki Kaurismaki. A find!

Wonderstruck

Millicent Simmonds in Wonderstruck

Todd Haynes' Wonderstruck attempts to be an artful children's flick, much like Scorsese's Hugo which was also written by the talented Brian Selznick. Haynes arrays an impressive mélange of visual effects to tell the parallel quests of two deaf children, fifty years apart, who both travel to New York City on quasi pilgrimages. The 1927 part of the film is shot in black and white and the 1977 in color. Mark Friedberg's production design, Carter Burwell's score, Sandy Powell's costumes and Edward Lachman's photography all contribute to making Wonderstruck a sensual delight. The care and splendor of the production, which nicely evokes the New York of two eras, bolsters the film's theme of finding the phantasmagoric magic inherent in life and art.

Unfortunately, the film bogs down during its second half. Haynes and Selznick slight the story of the twenties child, charmingly played by Millicent Simmonds, and the70's juveniles' tale is not as compelling. Like the protagonists of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the young lad of 1977 hides out with his chum in a museum. Haynes milks a modicum of wonder from this boys' fort set-up, but it soon bogs down into indifferent acting and artificially dramatic conflict.

However muddled the scenario, I found Haynes' sense of artistic quest to be more palpable here than in the highly praised Carol; which seemed. on second viewing, even more overly reverential and benumbed than when I first viewed it. The moments when Ms. Simmonds pours over lovingly rendered 20's film fan magazines or goes to a theater to see a mash-up of Sjostrom and Griffith silents show Haynes' love and care for his material. You get a sense of exhilaration that you find in the best parts of Haynes' canon: the opening of Velvet Goldmine or Cate Blanchett bringing it all back home as Dylan in I'm Not There. Wonderstruck may not have done much for Amazon's burgeoning coffers, but it shows Todd Haynes has not lost touch with his gifts. (3/1/18)