Love in the Time of Chlorine: Deep End (1970)

In the early eighties Julie Burchill wrote: “The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, infact, things to make women more like chums and less like millstone medallions.”

Deep End, Jerzy Skolimowski’s dreamlike, blackly comic coming-of-age masterpiece, brought back into the world by the BFI after over 40 years in the wilderness, tells a different story. For fifteen-year-old Mike (John Molder-Brown) becoming a man at the fag end of that most mythologised decade is not an experience from which he’ll emerge swaggering, self-assured and sexually blasé. Ultimately, little else but the pitfalls and dangers of the adult world are left etched in his blank doe eyes.

Mike is a school leaver newly employed at a seedy public baths. His older co-worker, Susan (Jane Asher) is a coral-haired Fulham femme fatale, equally sexy and mean. Susan tells Mike he can supplement the meagre wages by being ‘nice’ to the ladies who use the baths (“the gentlemen too”), even suggesting they swap clients according to taste. Mike’s initial fascination for Susan segues into unrequited love before blooming malignantly into fatal obsession. In dealing with life on the clammy-palmed brink of manhood, Deep End couldn’t be further from the Technicolor fraternal hi-jinks of the Hollywood model.

Skolimowsi was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1938, the son of a resistance fighter executed by the Nazis. A graduate of Poland’s National Film School, he went on to collaborate with his contemporary Roman Polanski on the script for the latter’s feature debut, Knife in the Water (1962). Skolimowski’s star seemed in the ascendancy with Le Depart in 1967, a French film that won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival, but his subsequent films (including Deep End) were little seen. His claim that he only ever makes films to please himself is borne out by the fitful artistry evident in the hit-and-miss work of his canon. He gave up film for painting in 1989, only returning to the former profession in 2010 with the Vincent Gallo vehicle Essential Killing which won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. Essential Killing could not get a release in America – a state of affairs which would have been a mighty blow for a director preoccupied with which direction the wind is blowing, but far less so for this uncompromising rebel soul.

Deep End, shot in 1970 and released the following year, may have pleased Skolimowski, but it didn’t find the public of 1971 in thrall. The mood of that time in the popular imagination has been oversimplified (hindsight does lend itself to oversimplification). As a result, Deep End, where it has been appraised at all, has been smeared with the facile idea that it represents the end of sixties optimism. And while the early Heath-era London of Deep End does revel in a certain kind of urban bleakness where the gains of the previous decade are noticeable by their absence, the fact is Britons were then actually enjoying an unparalleled period of post-war material joy: between 1970 and 1973 the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ households for the first time owned a car, a fridge, a television – and had their own bathroom. Yet in Deep End, the crumbling bath house relies on those few who have missed out, for whatever reason, on this material mobility. So if Deep End represents anything socially, it is not those who merely miss the sixties and its gains, but those who simply missed out. Likewise, Susan’s cynical, sexual libertinism can be seen not as the end result of a dead or failed social revolution, but the start of a new one – for the 1970s were the Real Sixties, the decade in which the new sexual order became quotidian. 

It would be reactionary to equate Susan’s sexually liberated attitude with her casual cruelty. The alleged egalitarianism of the sixties has done nothing for her: she’s a carnal prole gal making use of her physical charms before her bitterness curdles their power - the only power she has, or may ever have. And who’s to say her ease in matters sexual is a result of swinging London? Girls with no fear of men or their own sexuality are far older than the sixties.

The genius of Deep End is how overtly engaged it is in gender and sexual politics, but without allowing either issue to smother or drive the narrative. Skolimowski’s touch is light enough to forefront these issues without making us feel like ideologically drunk bystanders on the front lines of the early seventies sex wars.

As Mike, John Molder-Brown (resembling a very young and curiously sexless Brad Pitt) is the embodiment of innocence and driven by base sexual impulses. He looks disconcertingly young - like a boy who’s never cooked a meal, ridden alone on a bus or read a newspaper. On his first day at work, he is literally thrown in at the deep end of the pool by a bunch of his cocky, mean contemporaries; he flounders there, metaphorically, for much of the film. Mike is the antithesis of Karl Michael Vogler’s lecherous swimming teacher, slapping the damp, lycra-clad rumps of his gauche teenage girl students and fucking a bored-looking Susan in a disused cubicle. Mike’s also a greenhorn counterpoint to Susan’s foul-tempered, blokey fiancée, Chris (played by former sixties pirate radio DJ Christopher Sandford).

Susan is as sexually experienced as Mike is inexperienced, and their traditional gender roles are reversed at the most basic cinematic level: Mike is the object and Susan is the subject. She controls every sexual situation she’s in, as do other female characters – the ‘continental’ Soho whore, the smouldering “fat beauty” gloriously played by Diana Dors. Susan turns on Mike like a hellcat when he suggests she might be anything other than the mistress of her own fate (having found a cardboard cut-out of a nude ‘Susan’ on the doorstep of a Soho clip-joint, he yells at her on the tube that it can’t really be her because “You’re not like that!”. In response, she snaps “What AM I like? What am I supposed to be like?”)

As Mike comes to know Susan better, he begins not to see her as on object, but as a symbol of idealised womanhood, despite her cruelties such as offhandedly revealing to a besotted Mike that she’s engaged, throwing a dirty snowball at a dog and taunting the baths’ receptionist over her weight. Mike’s naivety preserves his romanticism and leads to one of the most comic exchanges in the film (“I love her,” he tells the policeman Susan’s called over after he gropes her in the cinema. “You perverted little monster!” he snaps back). This curious position of Mike’s is so rare as to make the film more of an oddity than it already is. For while Susan’s character seems entirely modern, (her strumpetry supposedly the result of first-wave feminism which has reached its zenith in the 21^st century) Mike’s fits in nowhere. He is neither of the past nor the present, unrecognisable as either a continuation of a historical male ‘type’ or a familiar modern figure: the bewildered innocent, inexperienced heterosexual male object is a type you will search nearly 120 years of cinema for in vain.

For Mike’s unquestionably the seduced, objectified virgin – nowhere more than in a scene with Diana Dors as his first lady client. She imprisons him in the bath cubicle, near-suffocating him against her mighty cleavage. In a breathless sexually drugged trance, she mauls Mike around the room while fantasising (apparently to the point of orgasm) about George Best scoring goal after goal in the FA Cup Final (“Tackle, dribble, dribble . . . he pushed it in, just inside the post . . . you can’t keep Georgie out . . . SHOOT!”). While Dors still looks every inch (or three) an icon of cheap glamour, the satin skin, pert pneumatic charms and clouds of silky, solarised hair that made her the Monroe of austerity Britain have long since fled. Once liberated from her looks however, she proved to be a character actress of some substance. (In an era where actresses are dieted, buffed, nipped and tucked way into middle age and beyond, it’s something of a shock to learn that Dors was a mere 39 here).

The Dors scene isn’t an isolated comic moment. Later, in grubby old Soho, Mike tries and fails to follow Susan and Chris into a nightclub (an awkward, embarrassing attempt at a foray into a decadent milieu - another deep end into which he pitches and flounders). So he hangs around Wardour Street buying countless hot dogs from a vendor played with artless hilarity by Bert Kwouk (and not, as cult mythology has it, Damo Suzuki, singer of Krautrock band Can, who soundtracked the film along with Cat Stevens).

The Soho scene, its inky darkness barely illuminated by silvery neon, is one of the few extended glimpses we get of 1970 London, and is a fine contrast to the dank, daytime mossy-hued suburban streets and the more predominant washed-out Eastern Bloc colour palette so particular to post-swinging, pre-glam British films (Many exteriors, however, were filmed in West Germany. The bathhouse ones were shot in Leytonstone.)

But it’s the surreal, hallucinatory touches that make Deep End a cult gem. The first example of this - when Mike falls in the pool within minutes of starting work - is so jolting in its incongruity, it’s like a scene spliced in from another film altogether. It looks like a nightmarish underwater ballet. The final scene justifies Skolimowski’s assertion that “As a poet my mind is trained along the path of poetic associations”: Mike and Susan’s pearly naked bodies, carnally linked and suspended in the icy blue wash, which is being slowly tainted with the scarlet mixture of blood and the more vivid red of viscous, spilt paint. In the damp air above the water, a lamp swings like a noose while Cat Stevens’s ‘But I Might Die Tonight’ soars then fades on the soundtrack.

Happily, Jerzy Skolimowski is not a forgotten or unjustly marginalised master of his field – but he is, as the world’s best film writer David Thomson has said “isolated . . . intractable”. And as a new audience has now discovered his masterwork, the very different kind of isolation in which Deep End was held for over 40 years may now enter history.