John Moulder-Brown plays a teen-aged London bathhouse attendant who forms a business alliance with female attendant Jane Asher. The object is to obtain better tips from their clients, but soon the impressionable Moulder-Brown falls in love with the older Asher. Brushed off by the girl in favor of a handsome swimming instructor, Moulder-Brown makes several halfhearted attempts at revenge. When the boy and girl finally do get together sexually, the event is motivated by lust and has tragic
results. Deep End observes how adolescent obsession can mushroom into disaster if one doesn't have the emotional equipment to cope. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc-existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.
Made in Munich but set entirely in London, it's a bizarre tail end to the swinging London cycle of the 1960s, centring on a rundown suburban public swimming pool and its adjoining private bathrooms and showers.
Everything about this singular film - the camerawork, the imagery, the soundtrack - feels vibrant and surprising in a way that makes most modern coming-of-age movies look formulaic and, well, shallow.
Jerzy Skolimowski's darkly satirical psychological drama of young lust, sexual callousness, obsession, and fantasy is a different kind of coming of age film.
This was a transcendent movie experience. Then, at the last second, Cat Stevens broke into the soundtrack and was able to kill the buzz of this movie that somehow combined the sensibilities of Godard and Truffaut ... once you sift out stuff you might see from Roeg and Lester. If Cat Stevens had sang the same song in
the last 30 seconds of Taxi Driver, it would have been only slightly less appropriate. Otherwise, throughout the movie, there's a German rock group called "Can" playing a disturbingly modern but tonal score that pulses forward and wants to date the movie in the future, like 1980 -- a scary addition to a movie with two characters who are always rushing ahead of themselves. There is great handheld camerawork that stays warm and intimate with characters at high speeds. Highly recommended, but to avoid what for me was a major buzz kill, a friend has to illegally rip the movie from the blue-ray restored edition and use his/her computer to replace the Cat vocal at the end with some Can.
Skolimowski's theatre of the absurd, sharing a lot of style and approach with Polanski (both were partners in crime for "knife in water") has to be one of the most overlooked and brilliant rites of passage in British cinema. The kind of film so great in its simplicity that makes you think how in hell you didn't come up
with something like that for a start. As the main character, I also have a soft spot for ginger, delicate Jane Asher.
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