Jerzy Skolimowski (1970)
Fifteen-year-old Mike leaves school with no qualifications and gets a job as a baths attendant – this in the days when the customers of public baths included not only swimmers but people who needed to get clean (and likely didn’t have a bath at home). Mike looks after the gents; his counterpart on the distaff side is Susan, probably in her early twenties. Occasionally she asks Mike to look after her ladies when she has to pop out. This turns out to mean pop over to Mike’s area, where she has quick sex with his customers, particularly a fortyish swimming instructor who brings classes of pubescent girls for lessons at the pool. Outside working hours, Susan also has a boyfriend, who’s not short of cash. This is all increasingly difficult for virginal Mike, whose crush on Susan turns into something more and more serious. Her London accent is further downmarket than his but she’s well groomed: in her white baths attendant’s smock, Susan has elegance and an almost clinical air of competence. She’s very pretty and, in this glum environment, radiant. If the idea of a jewel thrown into relief by a dull metal setting crossed your mind, it would certainly return in the closing stages of Deep End, which Jerzy Skolimowski directed from the exceptionally original and well-constructed screenplay that he wrote with Jerzy Gruza and Boleslaw Sulik. The picture came out perhaps less than a year before I got into regular filmgoing, and I’d never seen it before. Made with British and German money, it turns out that Deep End had virtually disappeared until recently, when restoration work was done in Bavaria. The BFI programme note used David Thomson’s piece about the film in a recent Sight and Sound. Thomson’s a fan and hadn’t known that the world had been close to losing Deep End. He writes about it with both relief and excitement. I understand why.
Although the images dominate to an extent that Skolimowski’s film might seem heartlessly arty, I think this is only because those images are so very strong – a beguiling combination of brightly-coloured beauty (eventually horror) and grunge. For example, in a sequence about half an hour from the end, Skolimowski presents snow almost traditionally at first – gently falling flakes, a magically pristine carpet. Susan is remonstrating with Mike, whose attempts to make him matter to her have turned desperate by now. She hits him, knocking the diamond out of her engagement ring into the snow, which quickly takes on a different colour and substance. As the pair hunt frantically for the stone, they keep picking up handfuls of the white stuff – dirtied by mud and, though it slips through their fingers, obdurate too. Earlier on, when the latrine green walls of the baths are repainted red, the colour is immediately striking (and strikes you as potentially symbolic). At the end of the film, Susan’s blood mixes with the water in the swimming pool as it’s refilled. The same swinging ceiling lamp that has caused her death slams into a tin of paint still at the poolside and the red of that bleeds into the water. This sounds crudely obvious: that it doesn’t come across that way is because of what happens between the first and last appearances of the red paint pots. No sooner has the paint been applied to the walls of the baths than it’s looking as old as the desiccated green – like rust, or dried blood. This transforms the vividness of the paint in the final sequence. The bright-dull duality of the visuals is mirrored on a psychic level too, as Mike swings between listlessness and intensity moving into obsession.
The story takes turns that are improbable but, in the context of the world Skolimowski creates, eccentrically believable. Mike has an idea of how to retrieve the diamond: he and Susan pack all the snow from within the circumscribed area where the stone must have fallen into plastic bags. They get these back to the swimming pool then boil a kettle and filter the melted snow. It makes psychological sense: you accept that both Mike and Susan would do anything to find the diamond. What they’re doing looks crazy but that craziness, and the physical effort involved, give their luggage of snow a real emotional weight, almost a Sisyphean quality (especially from the point of view of Mike, who, in order to get back into Susan’s good books, is helping her find the physical evidence of her attachment to another man). In an earlier episode, Mike is hanging round the club where Susan and her boyfriend Chris have gone to celebrate their engagement. Outside a neighbouring strip club there’s a lifesize model of a near-naked girl – with Susan’s face. Mike steals it. He sees Susan everywhere, he imagines what her body’s like and hates thinking about other men enjoying it, while he can’t possess the real girl. Mike may therefore be imagining things – but Susan, for the audience too, is elusive enough for us not to be sure.
The baths are a world of their own, bleak but pregnant with sexual possibility. Although Skolimowski used baths in Leytonstone to shoot the exteriors, most of the filming of Deep End was done in Munich and most of the cast were Germans, whose voices must have been dubbed by British actors. Not for the first time, the effect of dubbing is a sense of artificiality. Whether or not this was intentional, it contrasts intriguingly with the drab impersonality of the baths and gives the proceedings an incongruously momentous edge that’s both amusing and unnerving – as, for example, when the manager of the baths inveighs against slovenliness. The confusion of British and German elements is intriguing too. The manager is played by an actor called Karl Ludwig Lindt but the combination of his looks and the English voice imposed on him has a strongly Dickensian flavour. Erica Beer as the baths cashier has a heavy-lidded, ponderous voluptuousness that’s characteristically Teutonic yet she’s playing a sexually frustrated Londoner. In this company, you come to see Diana Dors, a bathhouse regular who tries to seduce and succeeds in terrifying Mike, as a comedy Valkyrie, although that description doesn’t do Diana Dors justice: there’s force and threat, as well as humour, in her seduction monologue. Its footballing metaphors anticipate a good later scene when Mike, on the run with the cardboard cutout of the nude Susan, takes refuge in the room of a prostitute (Louise Martini). There’s also an amusing error in the set dressing at one stage – a weihnachtspyramid, on top of a filing cabinet, gives away the German location where filming took place. (I don’t believe you could get those in East London as early as 1970.)
The rather exaggerated look and sound of the older characters contrasts very effectively with the inchoate Mike. John Moulder Brown’s voice is a little wooden but as a camera subject he’s emotionally fluid and he connects really well with everyone, especially Jane Asher as Susan. Mike’s outbursts of petulance, although only occasional, verge more and more nearly on violence. What he finally does, although shocking and uncharacteristic, is what he’s been heading towards. Mike dreams of making love to Susan in the swimming pool. First, this is simply a fantasy. Then he does it with the model stolen from the strip club. Eventually, it’s Susan’s dead body. The only real live sex between them is on the bottom of the pool while it’s drained of water and Mike fails to perform. Described in this way, the film sounds tediously schematic but watching it is very different. And watching Jane Asher, in her ankle-length yellow PVC mac and with her beautiful, distinctive colouring, you understand why this is the girl of Mike’s dreams. Asher’s expressive, incisive line readings ground her in reality too. The fine-featured, stylish, mercenary Susan is a lady and a tramp – somewhere between Mike and the older adults in terms of development. Susan’s learned to use her looks to get what she wants; in time, she’d settle into the limitedness of the other employees at the baths. But in a scene like the one in which Chris takes her to a sex film, Mike comes in and sits in the row behind them and she lets him fondle her, the fiancé unaware of what’s going on, you see that Susan hasn’t yet petrified into predictability. Her head on that cardboard nude is very right: she’s a sex object from the neck downwards but not an unthinking one.
The fiancé is sallow, long-faced Christopher Sandford – excellent as a young man with the financial resources but not the physical equipment to be suave. (You notice it particularly when he’s wearing a pale pink polo neck sweater as he arrives at the night club with Susan.) The heavy-set Karl Michael Vogler, as the lecherous instructor-paramour, has a complementary inadequacy. The only character who doesn’t really work is Mike’s ex-girlfriend Kathy (Anita Lochner) because she detracts from our idea of him as naïve and it’s hard to imagine what their relationship amounted to. The sequences in and around the seedy clubs are terrifically put together. The lighting (Charly Steinberger) and editing (Barrie Vince) impart a sense of danger but with real comedy in some of the exchanges in the street. Trying to make himself inconspicuous as he hangs around waiting for Susan and Chris to leave the club, Mike buys a hot dog, then another, then another. A group of evangelical Christians hand him some literature. Two scouse girls ask, ‘Where d’you get that?’ and there’s a bit of crosstalk concerning religious pamphlets and fast food. (The hot dog seller is Burt Kwouk and one of the girls is Cheryl Hall – the other seems to be uncredited.) The effective music by Cat Stevens is more akin to his good early singles like ‘Matthew and Son’ than to his softer-edged later work.
6 May 2011
