A Savage Punch and Judy

By JAY COCKS

Deep End is being advertised as if it were a sequel to Repulsion. But instead of ghoulish psychodrama, it offers canny black comedy. Executed with a surrealistic flourish by Polish Director Jerzy Skolimowski (who collaborated with Roman Polanski on the script of Knife in the Water), it transforms the rite of puberty into a frenzied and often wildly funny vaudeville.

Mike (John Moulder-Brown) is a teen-age fumbler who takes his first job as an attendant at a public bath and swimming pool located in the far reaches of some bleak London suburb. He is engulfed by sexual fantasies but terrified when any of his female customers attempt to initiate him. Little wonder. Women for him are a mystery and a threat. They either overwhelm him with bloated lust (like one patron who smothers him in a bone-crushing embrace while passionately discussing football) or exploit him, like Susan (Jane Asher), another attendant at the baths, whose simultaneous taunting and flirting Mike finds irresistible.

Backgrounds with Imagery. He frantically begins to pursue her, following her on a date to the cinema and caressing her while her fiance searches for the manager. He ruins one of her rendezvous in the bathhouse cabin by ringing the fire alarm. Susan only teases him more. Mike finally manages to provoke her so severely that she slaps him across the mouth, loosening the diamond of her engagement ring. Seeing a chance to redeem himself, Mike works out an incredibly elaborate scheme for recovering the jewel.

Skolimowski fills his backgrounds with imagery (a painter covering a wall in red, a man in the swimming pool rolling over and over in a kayak) that is both disorienting and quite funny. Mike is clearly descended from the manic protagonists embodied by Jean-Pierre Leaud in Godard's films and in Skolimowski's Le Depart. They all suffer their youth as if it were a wound.

Yet there is also about Deep End, as in Skolimowski's other work, a kind of viciousness directed toward his characters that prevents his films from being fully successful. Skolimowski is interested in effects, not causes. Mike's mania and Susan's sadism are largely unmotivated, so that as characters they are little more than puppets in a savage Punch and Judy. The film's last scene, which is a frightening realization of one of Mike's most deranged dreams, should properly be shocking and pitiful. But it is singularly unsuccessful, despite the talents of John Moulder-Brown and Jane Asher, who are engaging enough to bring at least a small measure of humanity to a film that is otherwise frozen in its own misanthropy.

Jay Cocks

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