Anonymous ID: 161957 Aug. 16, 2018, 12:03 a.m. No.2624364   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>2624299

 

Deep End – review

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. Mike (John Moulder-Brown), a lower-middle-class teenage innocent, takes a job under the supervision of the confident, sexually experienced, teasing Susie (Jane Asher, a key swinging London figure) not much older than himself, who initiates him into the routines and rituals of the place. The baths are clearly a metaphor combining the banality of bureaucracy and the troubled sexuality of society.

 

Susie then becomes a fetishised object of his desire, as realism of the most brutal sort merges into disturbing surrealism and his behaviour becomes increasingly delirious. The stilted acting supports the dream-like atmosphere, the supposedly sexual liberation of the 60s is treated as delusionary farce, and the extraordinary climax is acted out in the empty swimming pool. Interestingly Diana Dors plays a sexually voracious customer trying to seduce Mike; 14 years later she made her last screen appearance as an attendant at a suburban swimming bath depicted as a salubrious place, a centre of civic pride, in Joseph Losey's final film, Steaming.