DEEP END

dMYD DVD

Starring John Moulder Brown and Jane Asher

Trailer

Y

  All the best films have a swimming pool as a creepy rippling metaphor and this one’s no exception, a lost seventies cult-fest rescued by the BFI last year and trumpeted by Film Four as an apology for screening Zoolander sixty-eight times a week. Boy in a Bowie mask John Moulder Brown plays a blinder as Mike, box-fresh from school and embarking on a journey of poor-dubbing and sexual discovery down the local dirty-man bathes, while he’s ably mirrored by proto-Kelly Reilly Jane Asher as the spoon-licking object of his pent-up frustration. Both characters are layered like one of Asher’s cakes, taking blink and you’ll lose it twists every few minutes and indulging in a tete-a-tete up there with the best in cinema history, whilst the film’s missing years result in a lack of foreknowledge that clouds any suspicions you may have about where the wonky plot’s going.

  Like many of its seventies ilk it’s a stylistic ball-grabber, the cinematography and soundtrack giving the everyday a good bludgeoning of auteurist madness. From the pre-school primary colours of the bathes themselves to Burt Kwouk’s inexplicably sinister Hot-Dog salesman the film’s a triumph of druggy reality twisting, never explicitly strange but with a constant undercurrent of oddity that infests the players and their surroundings. Support characters drift in with ill-defined motivations  - the pervy boiler-man, the one legged hooker, unresolved figures moving in and out of the dream-like narrative, whilst one scene in particular sums up the creeping dread; Susan slowly licking her way around a yoghurt pot as the weirdo-receptionist looks on, a solitary man with a big red paintpot sliding his brush around the walls behind them. It’s a masterpiece of this weirdery, but would lose its greatness if it weren’t for the grounded work of the two leads; their conversations in the baths’ loft and corridors ring true to the strange intensity of work-relationships, the boredom, the ribbing, the ripping of posters to make a boy look pregnant. Their connection is the beating heart of the film’s weird blood, which makes it all the more disturbing as their strange little world comes dripping down around them.

  A brilliant, deranged film with the beauty of a Goddard and odd wonder of last year’sSubmarine, its multi-angled musings on sex and innocence put it up there with some of the 70’s best, even if it does go off THE DEEP END in the last few frames.

  Oh, and it has Diana Dors ranting like John Motson whilst she tries to smother a fifteen year old in her tits. Classic, and this version’s in German.