Darling
John Schlesinger (1965)
I’d not seen Darling for half a century and thought it might now be showing its age. It did so in a fundamental way: the print was in such a sorry state the film snapped four times in the course of this BFI screening. At least the interruptions, with the lights back up, were a rare opportunity to jot down thoughts still fresh in my mind. I also started wondering during the mini-intermissions how much would be lost if the problem couldn’t be fixed. (‘Re-lacing’ the film was the term used by the BFI person who explained, and apologised for, what was happening.) The opening credits of Darling accompany shots of an advertising hoarding. A world famine relief poster displayed there is gradually effaced by another poster; starving children’s faces make way for the hugely magnified image of a single face, belonging to the film’s protagonist, Diana Scott (Julie Christie). The new poster advertises the forthcoming serialisation of Diana’s life story in a magazine called ‘Ideal World’. These opening two minutes announce, with heavy-handed irony, Darling‘s satirical message – one delivered over and over, usually with the same sledgehammer touch, for the next two hours. The film managed to limp through to its end. If it had broken irreparably before the camera left the ‘Ideal World’ poster, you’d still have got John Schlesinger’s main point.
Schlesinger (like Ken Russell) cut his film-making teeth on the BBC arts documentary series Monitor, which ran from 1958 until 1965. Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde), the other chief character in Darling, fronts a Monitor-like programme. In an early sequence, he’s out of the studio conducting vox pops for a state-of-the-art/nation piece. The question he asks is, ‘What are you ashamed of in Britain today?’ The answers he gets – apparently unscripted answers from real men-in-the-street (they are all male) – include layabouts, homosexuals, the usual suspects of the time. Schlesinger and Frederic Raphael, who wrote the screenplay, train their sights on a different contemporary pathology, the self-centred hedonism of Swinging London and those who apparently thrive in it. But only apparently: fashion model Diana, who epitomises the condition, is chronically dissatisfied – she yearns to ‘feel complete’. Schlesinger and Raphael seem to think they’ve chosen a novel target, even though Fellini’s (incomparably richer) La dolce vita preceded their film by five years. Shot in black and white (Kenneth Higgins was the cinematographer), Darling was a commercial hit, especially in the US, and won awards on both sides of the Atlantic but its narrow perspective and lack of novelty didn’t go unnoticed at the time. The BFI programme note included incisive evidence of this – Penelope Houston’s review in Sight and Sound (Autumn 1965)[1].
Diana is occasionally heard in voiceover, talking with her (unheard) ‘Ideal World’ interviewer, but these bits aren’t essential to the narrative – they’re mostly a means of underlining her hypocrisy. She’s a small-time model and already married when she first meets Robert Gold, who introduces her to London media circles. They have an affair; Diana dumps her husband (Trevor Bowen), Robert leaves his wife (Pauline Yates) and kids. The voiceover explains how Diana ‘encouraged Robert to see his children – I’m not the jealous type’; the screen shows Diana throwing a strop because he has spent time away from her with his family. Despite the charisma of Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde, Darling is an unremarkable marital infidelity drama until Diana meets and sleeps with predatory advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey). Her immediate reward is only a crappy part in a trashy horror film but the symbolically-named Brand (who works for the symbolically-named Glass Industries) is her passport to high-end modelling and appearances in adverts, and to opulent decadence on both sides of the English Channel.
In London, Diana is the face of a world hunger charity and a star of its swanky fund-raiser. In what amounts to a gruesomely protracted reprise of the opening titles sequence, Schlesinger lampoons the self-approving falsity of the gathering. As the MP speaker at the event (Brian Wilde) wonders at seeing ‘so many hearts in the right place’, the camera concentrates on an overweight dowager – she wears a fur coat and a ransom in jewellery, picks the meat out of her sandwich and leaves the bread. Pictures of malnourished African children on the walls are upstaged by Black waiters, white-wigged and in regency costume: ‘I do like your black boys’, another woman congratulates the event organiser (James Cossins). These are two of many details in an episode that lays sardonic irony on with a trowel for approaching ten minutes. In Paris, Diana goes with Miles to a kind of jet-set demi-orgy – throbbing music, leering guests, cross-dressing, ritual humiliation, etc. This is the sequence perhaps most obviously indebted to La dolce vita, though Darling‘s version is relatively boring.
Diana seems to find it boring too but that’s typical of her. This is a fundamental problem with Frederic Raphael’s script. Diana isn’t an ingénue corrupted by fame or money: an empty vessel from the start, she appears driven by, as much as anything, a need to fill the void and keep ennui at bay, though she often fails to do so. There’s no suggestion that she could have led a fulfilling life if only she’d not been seduced by the wrong things and people. When she gets pregnant and has an abortion, it seems to be because motherhood would be too much like hard work. She strikes up a friendship with Malcolm (Roland Curram), a gay photographer. While they’re on holiday together on Capri, Diana tells Malcolm she ‘could do without sex – I don’t really like it that much’. (Schlesinger illustrates – in ways that now feel embarrassingly dated – that Malcolm doesn’t take the same view.) The heroine ends up – à la Grace Kelly, though Diana’s professional achievements are feeble in comparison – married to a continental European aristocrat, whom she first meets while filming a commercial for chocolates on his estate. As the consort of Prince Cesare della Romita (José Luis de Vilallonga), she’s soon fed up with her bird-in-a-gilded-cage existence and flies back to England, with a vague idea of reconciling with Robert. She fails, of course, and is last seen at Heathrow, preparing miserably to return to Italy. In the closing shots, a woman on a London street buys a copy of ‘Ideal World’ containing the ‘true story’ of Diana.
Woody Allen named Annie Hall (1977) for the psychological condition ‘anhedonia’, an inability to feel pleasure. (It’s what the Allen character in the film – not the title character – suffers from.) This – rather than the moral bankruptcy of the glamorous circles she gains access to – also seems to be the malaise afflicting Diana Scott. It’s pretty amazing that Julie Christie and Frederic Raphael both won Oscars for their work on Darling. (Julie Harris also won for the costumes, in the days when there were two costume design awards, for black-and-white and colour films.) Christie is certainly an extraordinary camera subject but her lack of emotional range – at least at this stage of her career – renders Diana’s petulant anguish more repetitive than perhaps even Schlesinger intended. There’s no denying the screenwriter’s talent for smart, bitchy dialogue – stylishly delivered by Laurence Harvey in particular – but Raphael is so intent on showing this off that he doesn’t mind who speaks it. Diana isn’t usually one for epigrams: to give momentum to one of her exchanges with Miles Brand, she’s suddenly Oscar Wilde.
Early on in their partnership, Diana accompanies Robert to the rural retreat of elderly Walter Southgate (Hugo Dyson), a distinguished writer of ‘regional’ fiction, who gives her one of his books. Diana subsequently attends his funeral, where a journalist catches sight of her and conducts an impromptu interview. She cluelessly feigns knowledge of Southgate’s work (‘Which of his novels are your favourites?’, ‘Well, all of them!’ – that sort of thing). Robert eventually earns brownie points for telling Diana home truths but Walter Southgate is the sole character of whom the makers of Darling seem to approve. Otherwise, it’s hard to know, from this film and the others that helped make Schlesinger’s name, what he saw as either a good way or a good place to live in the 1960s. The protagonists of A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) are trapped in claustrophobic, small-minded, provincial worlds (contemporary Lancashire and Yorkshire respectively). In the final scene of Billy Liar, the hero has the chance to escape but loses his nerve: the London-bound train pulls out with Billy still on the platform, leaving his dream girl, Liz, to head to the capital alone. Liz is played, memorably, by the same actress that, in her next outing for Schlesinger, will embody what’s wrong with making it big in London. The only one of his earlier films in which John Schlesinger treats all his main characters with balanced sympathy is Far from the Madding Crowd (a further collaboration with Julie Christie and Frederic Raphael, in 1967). The Thomas Hardy adaptation is also unique in the Schlesinger filmography of the decade as a story set safely in the past.
20 November 2021
[1] Houston thought the film’s ‘view of the world belongs to the corridors of Wardour Street. … Apart from star-struck adolescents, who aren’t presumably the audience Darling has in mind for itself, I believe people in general take a cooler and more sceptical view of show business and advertising than it suits those involved in these trades to imagine … showing the squalid, shabby, unhappy ‘reality’ (or, again, half-truth) below the surface is, in 1965, an act of daring mainly to those within the charmed circle. And to be disenchanted, in any case, one must first have surrendered to an enchantment’.