Deep End

Jerzy Skolimowski, en route to America from his native Poland, stopped off in the UK in 1969 to make Deep End, a strange blend of farce with something much darker, a tale of stalking done almost as a sex comedy.

It’s the story of an impressionable 15-year-old lad, Mike, who gets a job at a public baths – the sort that has both swimming and bathing, in “slipper baths” – and falls very hard for co-worker Susan, a young woman a few years older than him but way ahead of him in all the things that matter, most obviously sex.

Mike is played by the pretty John Moulder-Brown, Susan by Jane Asher at her most ravishing, in a role you might not expect from an actress who’s always had a fairly chaste image. Asher’s side hustle as a baker has only reinforced that.

Skolimowski starts his film off in a comedy register, with Mike being warned by Susan about the male and female bathers who will prey on those smooth-skinned features of his. Sure enough he is soon tangling with a customer who clearly wants more from Mike than a bottle of shampoo. She’s played by Diana Dors, once “Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe” but at this point in her career a well-upholstered bleach-blonde just on the point of getting her second wind as a fruity matron. She is very funny as “Mike’s 1^st Lady Client”, a woman whose early remarks to Mike about football – “It’s always tackle… dribble… dribble… shoot” – lead on to an orgasmic reverie in which George Best (still the sexiest footballer alive at this point) features heavily.

This is all preamble. Though Skolimowski keeps the tone light right to the film’s final moments, the story he’s telling is of a warped and disturbing fixation. Mike starts to follow Susan, sabotaging dates with her fiancé, disrupting her little affair with an older man, and getting away with one misdemeanour after another because he looks so angelic.

Susan is sexually active and not ashamed about it. Why she is engaged to the creepy Chris (Christopher Sandford) is a bit of a mystery. What she sees in the man billed as Teacher (Karl Michael Vogler) is also a puzzler. Since her standards seem so low, maybe she’ll sleep with Mike. Who knows? Skolimowski and Asher keep this possibility dangling as Mike pursues increasingly deranged strategies, like following Sue and Chris into a sex cinema and then fondling her from the seat behind.

It does not end well, for either party, and Skolimowski has been suggesting that from the very beginning with a production design that is garish, and cinematography (by Charly Steinberger) which has something of the paranoid energy of Roman Polanski (a fellow Pole with whom Skolimowski had worked). Grotesques loom large.

Set in London, with the sex shops of Soho making a cameo appearance, most of the movie was actually shot in Munich. But the vibe is British, particularly the leering, fearful attitude to sex, which runs right through it like an STI.

The chlorine tang, cold tile underfoot, echoes of children’s chatter, Skolimoski catches the particular ambience of the municipal swimming pool brilliantly, a strange place where people take off most of their clothes in a heavily regulated environment (no running, bombing or heavy petting, read the signs).

Both stars are a tiny bit too well spoken to be convincingly working class but their performances are more persuasive than their accents, and it’s only here and there that you can tell most of what they’re doing is improvised. Keep going was Skolimowski’s command, even when something goes wrong.

David Lynch is a big fan of the film. He likes its garish, vomit-inducing colours – look at that yellow wetlook coat Susan wears, for instance – and the 2010 restoration really does Skolimowski’s vision proud. All this and German krautrock pioneers Can (billed as The Can) on the soundtrack. There is a lot here to sink the teeth into.

Deep End – Watch it/buy it at Amazon

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© Steve Morrissey 2023