Deep End

Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. Starring Jane Asher, John Moulder Brown, Diana Dors, Karl Michael Vogler Club, IFI, Dublin, 90 min irishfilm.ie

Smaller-minded fans of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep Endmay have mixed feelings about this disinterment of the strangely neglected classic. Only intermittently available since its release in 1971 (as with so many international co-productions, rights issues intervened), the film has been, for many, a secret pleasure. Now anybody who cares can see the blasted thing.

A study of post-swinging London (though filmed largely in Munich) to compare with Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s

Performance

,

Deep End

follows a teenager (John Moulder-Brown) as he struggles with a new job at an unlovely public bathhouse. He immediately falls for a pretty co-worker (Jane Asher), but, assailed by the advances of older women (notably a fabulous Diana Dors), he has trouble finding time to exercise his growing obsession. From early on, it looks as if we are heading towards somewhere grim. So it proves.

Skolimowski, director of the recent, fine Essential Killing, was, famously, a co-writer of Roman Polanski's Knife in the Waterand, like that director's Repulsion, Deep Enddisplays no sentimental delusions about the contemporaneous state of the English capital. A wisp of Cat Stevens in the opening moments nods towards the hippie movement, but the film's most celebrated music cue finds Can, the mighty German noise terrorists, hammering out mechanical basslines during the protagonist's visit to a seedy sex club.

Such scenes have led many critics to view Deep Endas a savage comment on the growing economic and political decline in England. Perhaps the pool itself is a metaphor for the nation. Skolimowski is having none of it.

“It was not any kind of criticism of anything,” he told this writer recently. “I just got lucky. I somehow managed to get Jane Asher and Diana Dors, who was just amazing. The film somehow turned out to be great.”