Deep End (film)

Mike, a 15-year-old dropout, finds a job in a public bath. There he is trained by his colleague Susan, a woman 10 years his senior. Susan is a tease who plays with Mike's and other men's feelings, sometimes warm and affectionate and sometimes cold and distant. Working at the baths turns out to involve providing services to clients of a more or less sexual nature in exchange for a tip. For example, an older woman is sexually stimulated by pushing Mike's head into her bosom and talking suggestively about football. Mike is confused by this and at first does not want to accept the tip he gets, but Susan tells him that these services are a normal practice, including exchange of her female clients for his male clients whenever a client prefers the opposite sex.

Mike fantasizes about Susan and falls in love with her, but she has a wealthy young fiancé, Chris. Mike also discovers that Susan is cheating on her fiancé with an older, married man who was Mike's physical education teacher and works at the baths as a swimming instructor for teenage girls, touching them inappropriately. Mike follows Susan on her dates with Chris and the instructor and tries to disrupt them. Susan often gets angry at Mike for this, but provides just enough encouragement for him to continue. Mike's infatuation with Susan continues despite his friends mocking him, his mother being treated rudely by Susan, his bicycle being destroyed by Susan, and his activities drawing the ire of Susan's boyfriends, local police, and Mike's boss at work. Obsessed with Susan, Mike refuses other outlets for sex, such as his former girlfriend and a prostitute who offers him a discount. While following Susan on a date, Mike sees and steals a life-size advertising photo cutout of a naked girl who resembles her. He confronts Susan with it on the London Underground, flying into a violent tantrum in front of other passengers when Susan teasingly refuses to tell him whether she posed for the photo. Mike then takes the cutout to the deserted baths after hours and swims naked with it, embracing it.

The next morning, Mike disrupts the instructor's foot race and punctures the tyres of the instructor's car while Susan is driving it. Susan gets angry and hits Mike, in the process losing the diamond from her new engagement ring in the snow. Anxious to find the lost diamond, Mike and Susan collect the surrounding snow in plastic bags and take it back to the closed baths to melt it, using exposed electrical wiring from a lowered ceiling lamp outlet to heat an electric kettle in the empty pool. While Susan is briefly out of the room, Mike finds the diamond in the melted snow, and lies down naked in the dry pool with the diamond on his tongue. He teases Susan by refusing to give her the diamond until she undresses. She does so, he gives her the diamond, and she is about to leave, but reconsiders and lies down next to him. They have a sexual encounter, although it is not clear whether Mike is able to perform.

Chris then telephones and Susan rushes around the empty pool hurriedly gathering her clothes to go and meet him. Mike begs her to stay and talk to him, but Susan insists she has to leave. Meanwhile, an attendant has arrived, who, unaware of the presence of Mike and Susan, opens the valve to start filling the pool with water. Mike becomes more insistent, chasing Susan around the rapidly filling pool, and finally hitting her in the head with the ceiling lamp, injuring her. She falls (along with a tin of red paint that resembles blood) into the water. Mike embraces the nude Susan underwater, just as he embraced the photo cutout. Meanwhile, water continues to fill the pool with the live-electrical wire dangling within.

The film received critical acclaim, with Andrew Sarris comparing it with the best of Godard, Truffaut and Polanski. Penelope Gilliatt called it "a work of peculiar, cock-a-hoop gifts".[3] "The consensus when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1970 was that it would have been assured of winning the Golden Lion, if only the prize-giving hadn't been suspended the previous year."[3] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and called it an "observant and sympathetic movie" that "deserves a better ending".[6] Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote: "Although it has a strong and good story, Deep End is put together out of individual, usually comic routines. Many of these don't work, but many more work very well."[7] Variety wrote, "Sharply-edged hues, taut editing, a fine musical accomp, good playing alongside the leads and Skolimowsky's frisky, playful but revealing direction make this a pic with commercial legs and yet with a personalized quality for more selective spots."[8] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "a stunning introduction to a talented film maker", praising the "delicious humor and eroticism" as Skolimowski "plays with the audience much in the same way that Miss Asher entices Brown".[9] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called Deep End "a masterpiece" that "shows Skolimowski to be a major film-maker, impassioned yet disciplined. He runs an eloquent camera and evokes fine performances. (Moulder Brown and Miss Asher really are flawless)."[10] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote: "Judging from Deep End, Skolimowski has a fairly distinctive film personality, but it happens to be a split personality, split in a way—half-Truffaut, half-Polanski—that I find rather disconcerting and unappealing. Imagine a film like Stolen Kisses turning, at about the half-way point, into a film like 'Repulsion' and you have Deep End."[11] Nigel Andrews of The Monthly Film Bulletin called it "a study in the growth of obsession that is both funny and frighteningly exact."[12]

In an interview with NME in 1982, David Lynch said of Deep End: "I don't like colour movies and I can hardly think about colour. It really cheapens things for me and there's never been a colour movie I've freaked out over except one, this thing called Deep End, which had really great art direction."[13]

The film has a score of 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 20 reviews, with a weighted average of 7.42/10.[14]

• Deep End at IMDb
• Deep End at Rotten Tomatoes
• Deep End at BritMovie (archived)
• Deep End at AllMovie
• Deep End at the British Film Institute (with video from Q&A session with Jane Asher and John Moulder-Brown after first showing of the restored version, 4 May 2011)
• Optimism Unfulfilled: Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End and the Swinging Sixties by Christopher Weedman at Senses of Cinema
• Deep End: Ripe for Rediscovery at TCM Movie Morlocks