DARLING (71)

Directed by: John Schlesinger (1965)

Starring: Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Harvey

The Pitch: A beautiful model sleeps her way up the social ladder but is unable to find true happiness.

Theo Sez: A flashy artefact from an age of arrogance, innocence and madcap energy - what you might call the infancy of pop culture, when a world where everyone would be tragically hip seemed just around the corner. What's weird and fascinating about the film is the way it embraces this exciting new age without really understanding it or being of it, making for a slight self-consciousness that's actually what makes it such a good document of its time (in the same way, perhaps, that the clumsy political correctness of black judges and saintly gay characters in Hollywood movies today will say more in 30 years about the awkward texture of 90s life than any number of "message movies"). It shares the visual tricksiness and larky transitions of the French New Wave (cutting from our fickle heroine telling her husband "Where would I be without you?" to shots of her swanning round Paris - without him), and the cheerful contempt for the prole-in-the-street of Richard Lester's mid-60s movies, but it's an impostor, as though one of the down-to-earth Northerners from Schlesinger's previous movies (A KIND OF LOVING and BILLY LIAR) had disguised himself in trendy trappings and come down South to wander, shaking his head contemptuously, through the empty decadence of Swinging London - but then had become caught up in its energy and its sense of fun. The film's satire is both crude (rich old biddies stuffing themselves at a charity dinner for starving African kids) and bewildering : everything about it - its playfulness, its bitchy wit, its restless quicksilver style - marks it out as indistinguishable from what it's meant to be satirising. Though it also makes it very entertaining.