Diving Into the Adolescent Mind
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The best youth-culture movies of the 1960s mix grooviness with unease. Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night” harbors genuine melancholy beneath its irresistibly frothy façade. In two of his subsequent ’60s time capsules — 1965’s “The Knack … and How To Get It,” and especially 1968’s “Petulia” — Mr. Lester outed an era nostalgically recalled as one of hope and social freedom as just the same morass of miscommunication, sublimation, and self-defeat that human beings can make out of any historical period.
Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1970 film “Deep End” is perhaps the least swinging vision of swinging London ever made. Starting today, Anthology Film Archives will show “Deep End” for one week as part of its ongoing retrospective of Mr. Skolimowski’s films. Everything in Anthology’s welcome tribute is worth seeing. The 69-year-old Mr. Skolimowski (visible onscreen this summer playing Naomi Watts’s ex-KGB busybody stepfather in David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises”) is a director of substantial skill and range. “Deep End” is his masterpiece and it remains one of the unheralded gems of what is currently the most critically lionized period in sound filmmaking.
As “Deep End” opens, Mike (John Moulder-Brown), a handsome 16-year-old Londoner just out of school, lands a job at the Newford Baths, a seedy swimming pool and bathhouse complex. Newford’s pool plays host to school gym classes, and its gender-segregated private bathing facilities offer a kind of downmarket spa. Mike soon learns that many customers arrive expecting particularly intimate treatment — attention that Susan (Jane Asher), his beautiful, tawdry, difficult, and utterly fascinating co-worker, is willing to provide for a price.
Though they are attracted to each other, Mike is in adolescent developmental stasis and Susan, when not selling her favors at work, is conducting a self-destructive affair with a married man and is engaged to a tactless dullard whose idea of a night out is a trip to the local porno theater. But the chemistry is there, even if the mental health necessary to bring things to a proper boil isn’t, and Mike and Susan’s clumsy flirtations escalate into even clumsier head games and pranks. Their dysfunctional relationship is eventually dwarfed by the magnitude of Mike’s confused, though single-minded, obsession with Susan, one that ultimately precludes anything meaningful between them except tragedy.
Blending irreverent, slapstick giddiness with a genuinely disturbing portrait of a friendless teenage boy’s lovesick mind, “Deep End” plays like the bastard child of Hal Ashby and Roman Polanski’s cinematic sensibilities. Mr. Skolimowski’s camera essays the London of “Deep End” — ostensibly the creep capital of the Western Hemisphere — in ambitious long takes. In concert with a soundtrack by pre-religious conversion Cat Stevens and proto-punk future prog-rock giants Can (credited as “The Can”), the director twists sexual sublimation, soap scum, chlorinated water, and fish-belly-white skin into images of limpid, haunting beauty.
I first encountered Mr. Skolimowski’s film on the bottom half of a double bill with Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s better-known and marginally more upbeat vintage dissection of the psyche, “Performance,” at the long shuttered Circle Theater in Washington, D.C., nearly 30 years ago. The peculiar pall that “Deep End” cast caught me completely by surprise and I made a point of revisiting the film every time it returned to the Circle to gauge my personal teenage self-immolation by the morbid beauty Mr. Skolimowski conjured onscreen.
What I was also not prepared for is that by the mid-1980s, “Deep End” was, for all intents and purposes, a lost movie. Outside of a showing at MoMA’s temporary film headquarters on 23rd Street a half decade or so ago in a copy that looked like it had been unearthed in the museum’s restoration, to my knowledge “Deep End” has gone unseen in New York until now. The print showing at Anthology was struck by Paramount Pictures specifically for this engagement, and it is not to be missed. A one-of-a kind plunge into misanthropy, lust, and transcendence, this courageously unsentimental yet keenly sensitive work of art unpacks the messy tangle of the teenage male psyche with an acuity unmatched anywhere else in cinema.
Through December 12 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).