DEEP END (73) (77 - second viewing)

Directed by: Jerzy Skolimowski (1970)

Starring: John Moulder-Brown, Jane Asher, Diana Dors

The Pitch: A virginal 15-year-old boy gets a job at a rather sleazy public baths, and develops a crush on a sexy older attendant.

Theo Sez: Not a perfect film, better than that : a humorous and haunting one. Moulder-Brown is in a sense miscast, far too well-spoken for the working-class boy he's supposed to be, but his refined manners add to the air of innocence - the ironic joke being that innocence is ultimately lethal. It's in the growing-pains genre exemplified most recently by RUSHMORE - playing out the principle that, when you're young, love is indistinguishable from obsession - but it's a polar opposite to that carefully-constructed film, loose and semi-improvised, with an often jumpy camera (presumably handheld, which might also explain the post-sync sound) and the picaresque comedy of the Czech New Wave. Our hero drifts, which is most of his charm - wriggling helplessly as a buxom middle-aged client gets off by rubbing him against her (while she talks about football!), loitering outside a seedy club (an extended, 20-minute sequence) eating endless hot dogs while he waits for the woman he loves (and her fiancé) to show ; the film drifts with him, too much so perhaps, but it builds up a certain texture - semi-surreal, pregnant with inchoate desires, set in a faded, grimy, post-Swinging London, the greyness broken by occasional daubs of lurid colour (a yellow raincoat, a drop of blood) standing in for our boy's burgeoning sexuality. Skolimowski lets scenes run, which is probably the best way to handle the subject - stay with any emotion long enough and it starts to shade into obsession. The result is sloppy but charming, with a kick at the end ; once you disqualify THE 400 BLOWS as pre-pubescent, this may well be the freshest, most unforced rites-of-passage movie ever made.