I love Deep End and not just because it contains two of my favourite (very different) British actresses. I love it not just because it has an amazing soundtrack by Cat Stevens. I love it not just because of its obsession with the colour red, or its wonderful cameos. But all of those things make it stand out as one of the best films of the late 60s/early 70s. Deep End is a sexual awakening film with a difference - almost everyone is a sexual predator. It is both jarring and visually fascinating. Although a British film, this is not Britain as we know it - the director, Jerzy Skolimowski, is Polish, and the film's style feels distinctly European. Skolimowski got the actors to improvise some of the scenes, giving them an unpredictable, unpolished energy at times. Even if you were around in London in the 1970s, I think you'd still find the world that this film depicts to be discombobulating, perhaps because a lot of it was shot in Munich,including the fading, rococco leisure centre which is meant to be Newford Baths.
Ah, Newford Baths. In Britain, council-run leisure centres flourished until around the 1980s, when they began to be overtaken by privately owned gyms. There are still hundreds of them around though and many still show the design quirks of decades hence - 1970s ones often have dark wooden double doors and indoor brick walls, sometimes the signage is in a typeface that nobody uses any more except for retro purposes. Newford Baths is a prime example of this kind of leisure centre, although it seems to have been built in the 1920s or 30s, and is undergoing a kind of lacklustre renovation - a man has been employed to "update" all the paintwork, from a kind of sickly green to symbolic deep blood red.
1970s leisure centres can be slightly dodgy places (they still are), and Newford Baths is no exception. Enter the latest employee, 15 year old Mike (John Moulder Brown), who has just left school and has been put in charge of the Men's Baths section. This is definitely a thing of the past. In the days before all homes had their own bathing facilites, rather than hauling the tin bath to the fireside, people could hire a small room with a bath in it, hence Mike is paid to bring towels and soap to clients and keep the bath-rooms clean and respectable. Except it is all a very seedy affair. Mike's female counterpart, Susan (Jane Asher), hints that they can make more money in tips by vaguely indulging the sexual interests of the customers, and she offers to swap corridors with Mike every now and again. In an early, shocking scene a female customer, played by Diana Dors, roughly fondles Mike while vocalising a sexual fantasy about the footballer George Best. In the 50s and early 60s Dors was the British Marilyn Monroe, but she had fallen on harder times by this point, owing £48,000 to the inland revenue and having to tour working men's clubs. This role would be followed by even stranger ones in the years to come - a matriarch of a family of werewolves in an episode of Hammer House of Horror (1980), and the Commander of a Britain run by woman in a comedy mini-series in The Two Ronnies (1981). Deep End marks a new direction in the kinds of roles she would take - and this second stage of her acting career is much more interesting than the glamour-puss characters she played earlier.
Susan is a bit of a cold fish, enjoying male attention and drama. She has an animosity with the cashier (Erica Beer) who doesn't have a name and barely any dialogue but puts in a memorable, fussy, comedic performance, despising Susan with her ice-creaming eating, and cock-blocking her by not taking her phone messages. Her initial sisterly interest in Mike starts to take on a more flirtatious tone, and he quickly develops an obsession with her, which she initially doesn't seem to mind. He stalks her on a date with her boyfriend to a sex cinema, and then starts feeling her up. She lets him do it for just a little bit too long before she makes a fuss and gets him into trouble.
One of the highlights of the film though is when Mike follows Susan on another date, into the depths of Soho, trying to gatecrash a trendy club. This is a real slice of anonmie nightlife, with a lot going on. Two Scouse girls chat Mike up, just so he'll buy them hotdogs from Bert Kwok's unfailing polite vendor (they still have these in parts of London, late at night). Mike spots a cardboard cut-out of a naked woman who looks just like Susan, outside a sex-shop. He steals it and then to avoid being caught, ends up in an authentic Soho brothel - actually it's just a bedroom and Beata the ("lovely Continental") prostitute has her leg in plaster. She offers him a discount but they just end up chatting. The evening ends with Mike confronting the real Susan with the cardboard cut-out Susan, on the London underground while sundry travellers tut around them (later that evening he swims with the cut-out Susan in the pool).
Susan's been busy though - Mike's old gym teacher is another of her paramours, and he's just as besotted with her as anyone else. The scenes where the gym teacher practucally salivates over a class full of teenage girls in their swimming costumes, patting them inappropriately, is deeply awful from today's perspective, although it reveals much about the values of the period.
I love the framing of this shot - Susan's hair is practically the same colour as the newly painted part of the wall while the swimming teacher stands in the yet to be updated part of the room, with the paint chipped and fading. It looks almost like a split-screen, showing the generation gap between "with-it" Susan and the older man. Jane Asher has had one of the most interesting acting careers in the UK. Famed as Paul McCartney's girlfriend for a time, she was initially a child actress who appeared in the Quatermass Experiment (1955). She also appeared in the unnerving television play The Stone Tape (1972), where she is terrorised by time-travelling aliens from the past. And in the film Closing Numbers (1993) she played, with great delicacy, a woman who discovers her husband is gay and HIV+.
The film's title doesn't need much decoding - the Deep End is not just the dangerous part of the swimming pool, it spells out Mike's predicament - he is the ingenue who's in over his head. Although it's also Susan's deep end. Desperate to impress Susan, Mike is driving to increasingly bizarre acts, culmulating in a dream-like tragedy so bizarre that it could only be made up (it involves a ring, the swimming pool, a lamp and a lot of snow).
Deep End is that rare film that is both funny and deeply disturbing. It also manages to make you care about its characters likeable, despite the fact that they are all flawed or unlikeable.
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