Deep End (film)

Deep End
UK theatrical release poster
Directed by	Jerzy Skolimowski
Written by	Jerzy Skolimowski Jerzy Gruza Boleslaw Sulik
Produced by	Helmut Jedele
Starring	Jane Asher John Moulder-Brown Diana Dors
Cinematography	Charly Steinberger
Edited by	Barrie Vince
Music by	Cat Stevens Can
Production companies	Maran Film Kettledrum Productions
Distributed by	Jugendfilm-Verleih (West Germany) Connoisseur Films (United Kingdom)
Release dates	1 September 1970 (1970-09-01) (Venice Film Festival) 25 March 1971 (1971-03-25) (United Kingdom)
Running time	91 minutes
Countries	West Germany[1] United Kingdom[1]
Language	English

Deep End is a 1970 psychological comedy drama film directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and starring John Moulder-Brown, Jane Asher and Diana Dors.^[2] It was written by Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza and Boleslaw Sulik. The film was an international co-production between West Germany and the United Kingdom. Set in London, the film centres on a 15-year-old boy who develops an infatuation with his older, beautiful colleague at a suburban bath house and swimming pool.

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 1 September 1970. Deep End, considered a cult classic, went unreleased for many years due to rights issues. In 2011, it was given a digital restoration with the co-operation of the British Film Institute and was released in theatres and on home media.

Mike has left school at 15 to earn his keep. He finds a job in a public bath in East London. He is trained by Susan, in her mid-twenties. Susan can be fun-loving and affectionate yet often coldly serious or cruel. Mike's first female client asks him to help her undress and pushes his head into her bosom, talking amorously about George Best. Mike feels violated, and at first does not want to accept the tip Susan brings him. Susan tells him the flirtatious role-play is a normal practice at the baths for larger tips and encourages him to serve some of her female clients.

Mike becomes infatuated with Susan. He gets into a scrap with some boys making vulgar comments about her and falls into the pool. Susan spies on him naked in the boiler room putting on his dried clothes.

Susan has a well-off fiancé, Chris. Mike also discovers that Susan is having an affair with Mike's former gym teacher, who’s married and brings his girls swimming class to the pool. Mike follows Susan as she leaves with Chris. Chris pressures Susan to go into a soft-core adult movie theatre. In the theatre, Susan pushes Chris away. Mike sits directly behind the couple. He strokes his face along Susan's arm. She does nothing. Mike reaches around the seat and fondles her breast. Susan slaps him and tells Chris that a stranger is "touching her up." As Chris gets the manager, Susan kisses Mike deeply. He’s overjoyed.

Mike, in a suit, tries to impress Susan by going to the Soho nightclub Chris is taking her, but it’s too expensive. He waits outside eating multiple hotdogs. Down the street, Mike steals an advertising photo cutout of a stripper who resembles Susan. He confronts Susan with it on the London Underground, flying into a tantrum when she refuses to tell him if she is the woman in the photo. Leaving Susan on the Tube, he takes the cutout to the baths after hours and swims naked, embracing it. He has a mental image where he's holding the actual Susan. Mike has been rejecting other opportunities for sex, such as his former girlfriend who comes to the baths and directly propositions him, and a prostitute with a broken leg near the Soho nightclub who offered him a discount.

The next morning, Mike jumps into a foot race directed by the gym teacher. He plants glass to puncture the tyres of his car. They puncture when Susan goes to drive it. She is furious and hits Mike, knocking the diamond out of her engagement ring into the snow. Anxious to find it, Mike and Susan collect the surrounding snow in plastic bags and take it back to the closed baths to melt it. Mike uses exposed electrical wiring from a lowered ceiling lamp to power a kettle in the empty pool. The gym teacher comes for his keys and Susan runs him off, accusing him of ruining her life by grooming her. When Susan leaves the room, Mike finds the diamond and lies down naked with it on his tongue. He won’t give it to her, implying he wants something in return. Susan starts unzipping her clothes but Mike backs down and hands her the diamond. She goes to leave but reconsiders and lies down with him. They have a sexual encounter, which ends suddenly.

Chris telephones, and Susan gathers her clothes to go and meet him. Mike begs her to stay and talk to him. Meanwhile, the stoker is in the building and opens the valve to start filling the pool with water. Mike becomes more insistent, holding onto her clothes as she walks around in the rapidly filling pool. When she goes to the ladder, Mike petulantly swings the ceiling lamp in her direction. It strikes her head. Dazed and bleeding, she falls under the water, as the lamp knocks cans of red paint into the pool. Mike embraces Susan underwater, just as he as he did in his mind when he held the cutout. Water continues to fill the pool, with the live, exposed wire dangling within.

The film was made in about six months from conception to completion.^[3] The movie was known during production as Starting Out with finance coming from America and Germany.^[4]

It was shot largely in Munich, with some exterior scenes shot in Soho and Leytonstone in London.^[3] The cast members could improvise and were told to remain in character even when a scene was not going as planned.^[3] Many years after the film's release, Asher denied suggestions that she had used a body double for some of her scenes; "I certainly didn't! ... And, looking back, I like the way it's done".^[5]

The film features the song "Mother Sky" by Can in an extended sequence set in Soho,^[6] and "But I Might Die Tonight" by Cat Stevens in the opening scene and finale;^[3] the previously unreleased version heard in the film was eventually released in 2020 on a reissue of Stevens' album Tea for the Tillerman.^[7]

The film received critical acclaim. In The Guardian, Ryan Gilbey wrote: "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] Penelope Gilliatt of The New Yorker called it "a work of peculiar, cock-a-hoop gifts".^[3] Variety praised the lead actors and "Skolimowsky's frisky, playful but revealing direction".^[8] Nigel Andrews of The Monthly Film Bulletin called the film "a study in the growth of obsession that is both funny and frighteningly exact".^[9]

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".^[10] 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".^[11] Film critic Andrew Sarris described it as "the best of Godard, Truffaut, and Polanski, and then some; nothing less, in fact, than a work of genius on the two tracks of cinema, the visual and the psychological".^[12][13]

A lot of critics disliked the ending, which they saw as too downbeat and shocking. Some critics said that removing the ending would change nothing in the movie.^[3][14] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it an "observant and sympathetic movie", but criticizing its ending.^[15] 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."^[16] 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 [1965] and you have Deep End."^[17]

Critics also lauded Skolimowski's strategic use of colour.^[16][14] 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."^[18]

Writing of the film's restoration in 2011, The Guardian's Steve Rose wrote, "Deep End is bravely ambiguous and disjointed, lurching unpredictably between comedy and creepiness; but the characters are bracingly down to earth…In fact, 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."^[19] Slant Magazine's Jaime N. Christley praised "Skolimowski's hallucinatory, dissonant, yet compelling tale of hormonal confusion".^[20] In The Village Voice, Michael Atkinson called it a "strangely impetuous study of coming-of-age sexual muddle, full of whimsy and abrupt ideas, and intoxicated from a distance, it seems, by Swinging London's free-love commerce".^[21]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10.^[22]

Jane Asher was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.^[23]

In 2009, Bavaria Media, a subsidiary of Bavaria Film, which co-produced the film in 1970 through its subsidiary Maran Film, began a digital restoration in honor of the film's 40th anniversary, in cooperation with the British Film Institute.^[24] The restored film was re-released in UK cinemas on 6 May 2011 and on Blu-ray Disc and DVD on 18 July 2011 as part of the BFI Flipside series.^[25] The disc extras included the documentary Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End and deleted scenes.^[26]

• Deep End at IMDb 
• Deep End at BritMovie (archived)
• Deep End at Rotten Tomatoes
• Deep End at the British Film Institute
• Deep End at the TCM Movie Database
• Deep End: Ripe for Rediscovery at TCM Movie Morlocks