We\u2019re being toyed with, of course. We\u2019re looking at a bicycle, belonging to the film\u2019s fifteen-year-old protagonist Michael. It\u2019s the first of director Jerzy Skolimowski\u2019s many pranks and feints throughout his 1970 international breakthrough. Though he was thirty-two at the time with eleven features already under his belt \u2013 mostly shot in his native Poland \u2013 there\u2019s a heedless anarchy to his English language debut that feels aligned with the sensibilities of someone much closer to boyhood. Coming in just at the tail-end of the \u201cswinging London\u201d 60\u2019s, soaked with bright colors and the fruitful fumes of sex, there\u2019s the feeling that anything could happen, not all of it good. Not all of it is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Michael (John Moulder Brown) has just dropped out of school and taken a job in a suburban bath house. Skolimowski unbalances his viewers right away; throughout Michael\u2019s interview with the bath house owner, an alarm brays constantly in the background, disrupting the dialogue. The cacophony continues as he\u2019s shown the ropes by Susan (an alluring Jane Asher), an ambiguously older but plainly more experienced redhead, who initiates the virginal Michael into a world of raucous youths roughhousing in the pool and louche adults waiting behind closed doors. \u201cJust go along with the gag, that\u2019s all they want,\u201d she says when he balks at the idea of \u201cservicing\u201d customers. In his first such encounter, a woman asks if he likes football then proceeds to dry hump him while moaning about Georgie Best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The production design of the facilities is like grindhouse Wes Anderson \u2013 luridly painted and riddled with filth but enticing in its grimy precision, as if sketched by a deviant hand. All of Skolimowski\u2019s London has a nocturnal edge, even in daylight, though his characters rarely venture into it; when not at the bath house, they\u2019re sneaking into dirty movies or stumbling into brothels. There\u2019s an unnerving hermetic seal over the environment, almost prophylactic in nature, if you will. While many of the situations that Michael gets into are undeniably comic, there\u2019s menace too, a creeping impression that the surface may soon rupture, revealing the rottenness underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gary Arnold\u2019s assertion in The Washington Post<\/em> that the film is \u201chalf-Truffaut, half-Polanski\u201d is on point in that regard, though he considered it a flaw. Modern viewers, on the other hand, may be more attuned to this vibe, particularly those who were taught to be vigilant against male toxicity and entitlement. Though terms like \u201cnice guy\u201d and \u201clocker room talk\u201d are never uttered in the film, Deep End<\/em> feels prescient in its depiction of how dehumanizing attitudes towards women live latent in the atmosphere, and how that hostility can become overt in the right circumstances. Both Michael\u2019s old classmates and the forty-something boiler room attendant speak of \u201cgiving it\u201d to Susan. The swimming coach, who taught at Michael\u2019s school, openly slaps the bottoms of his female teenage pupils. Some mindsets are never outgrown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually Michael becomes dissatisfied with merely sharing lunches and swapping shifts, and his behavior veers to copping a non-consensual feel of Susan in a movie theater and stalking her outside a nightclub. Yet even these scenes have an impish energy; Skolimowski, who also wrote the script, delights in letting them zig and zag in unexpected directions, stretching them on until they become akin to the Simpsons<\/em> rake gag. Michael orders so many hot dogs from a vendor outside the nightclub, for example, that he starts getting them gratis. Our laughter lulls us into forgetting what we\u2019re actually seeing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But once Susan\u2019s ambivalent feelings towards him curdle into outright loathing, Michael escalates even further, engaging in petty retaliation against the various men in her life \u2013 accusing her fiance of trying to molest him and putting glass under the tires of the swimming coach\u2019s car \u2013 until he accosts Susan herself on the tube, pulling at her hair and shrieking about her sexual escapades like a peevish child. Out of his depth when confronted with the actual contours of physical intimacy, he can only retreat into his dreams. By the final scenes, these fantasies have converged with his reality in treacherous ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n To reveal how the film, ahem, climaxes would be a crime to viewers who haven\u2019t yet experienced it. It also risks painting the film as a simplistic \u201cbirth of an incel\u201d screed. But Deep End<\/em>, like all of Skolimowski\u2019s work, is far more complex than its surface pleasures or hairpin turns let on. Suffice to say that Michael\u2019s last act feels as much accidental as foreordained. The skin and liquid that opened the film flood the frame once more, rendered newly perverse by all that\u2019s happened in between. Our hero gets what he wants, but at the expense of possibly ever getting anything again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Deep End” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/deep-end2-1024x557.jpg\")
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Michael\u2019s infatuation with Susan initially seems more innocent, the boy too hapless and easily flustered to pose much of a threat. Her reception of him runs hot and cold; she can turn on a dime from flirtatious to maternal, indulgent to irritated. Asher plays her with an insouciant melancholy, constantly testing the boundaries of men\u2019s patience with her, sometimes out of boredom, sometimes out of fear, and Skolimowski\u2019s camera often keeps her at an ardent remove, as if it\u2019s hesitant to approach her in the same ways as Michael. She holds her knowledge of the world like a match about to burn her, aware of both her power and its limits. It\u2019s easy to see why he loves her. It\u2019s also easy to see that his love is a hair\u2019s breadth away from hatred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n