The late 60’s counterculture youth movement enjoyed the celebration of sexual freedom, and British films coming out at the time lionized this freedom with movies such as, “Alfie”, and, “Georgy Girl”. Those movies made all the free uninhibited sex seem like so much fun. Jerzy Skolimowski’s black comedy, “Deep End”, takes a more serious and sinister look at the aftermath of sexual freedom that came out of the swinging 60s.
The movie is set in the edgier sleazier side of, not only the city of London, but of British society itself. The film’s hero is a baby face 15-year-old high school drop-out named Mike (John Moulder-Brown), who as the movie begins has just started his first job as a bath attendant in a rundown London bathhouse. At the end of the 60’s, many London apartments did not have their own private bathrooms. While toilets were available in many residential buildings, it was the public bathhouses that served as the prime source of bathing for many people. Mike works as the bath attendant for the male baths, and a pretty, young redhead named Sue (Jane Asher) works as the attendant for the female baths. Sue is the veteran employee, and proposes to Mike that every once in a while they exchange male for female patrons, in order to encourage the sexual fantasies of these patron, and for the purpose of receiving better tips. In other words, she wants Mike to prostitute himself to repressed housewives and sexual degenerates. The thing is, that Mike is a sexually frustrated teenage neurotic who is scared to death of all these women. He also falls in love with Sue. His love, as is the case with a lot of coming-of-age teenagers, turns into obsession. At that point the movie evolves from being a coming-of-age comedy into something darker and more sinister.
Skolimowski, who came from the Polish new wave movement of the 60’s, films his story almost entirely from the prospective of Mike, giving the film a hysterical tone of paranoia throughout. When Mike is spying on Sue, I felt that I was spying along with him. As these scenes of fear and anxiety ratchet up, so too does the tone of the entire movie. This has an effect of unease to the viewer, making this a movie that not everyone can appreciate. This is very similar to Michael Powel’s, “Peeping Tom”. It becomes clear through his actions, that Mike is petrified of sexually assertive women, and there is even a strange scene where what appears to be Mike’s ex-girlfriend from school arrives at the bathhouse to offer him her body. Here too he runs away in fright. It is Susan that he wants, and his obsession is so great that he does not even realize that it is her sexually liberating freedom that he is most scared of. Sue uses this freedom to play with the affections of multiple suiters. This includes a sexually obsessed playboy, for whom she claims is her fiancé, and a lecherous married high school teacher, who is shown behaving lecherously with the young school girls under his care, during a swimming class.
Mike’s obsession leads him to the sleazy Soho district of London, in a fascinating segment that depicts Mike preferring eating a hot dog to watching a sex show. As more and more of the sex shop patrons try to solicit his patronage, without a care about his age, Mike keeps rejecting them for yet another hot dog at the food stand outside. The reason he is there in the first place is because he is stalking Sue and her perverted fiancé. By this time the movie ceases to be funny. Black comedies can be comedies based on frightening and dangerous subjects, or they can be films that are humorous at the outset before they are not and veer suddenly into something that is quite the opposite of funny. Deep End is that type of black comedy.
The movie’s ending for me is very symbolic with its use of rushing water and sexual imagery. The color red plays a very strong symbolic part in the movie, representing not only death, but also the end of innocence. The nudity in this movie was even more upfront and explicit then, the previous years, “Midnight Cowboy”, which shocked movie going audiences at the time. That this movie includes a 15-year-old teenager as its main protagonist just adds to the shock.
“Deep End”, is a serious depiction to the darker consequences of the sexually revolution that occurred at the end of the 60’s. It is not a happy film and no real coming of age occurs to its main protagonist. The ambiguous ending adds to it tale of warning as the movie had me thinking about what I saw long after the closing credits ended. Riveting as well as disturbing, the movie is never boring and is an important work from the emerging realism of 70’s cinema.
1001 Movies before you die 