Deep End

Deep End is good at making desire feel embarrassing, and less consistently good at making its strangeness feel necessary. Jerzy Skolimowski approaches youthful longing with a willingness to let comedy become uncomfortable before we have finished enjoying it. The swimming-pool setting gives that approach somewhere specific to work: a place where physical exposure need not bring any greater understanding of another person. We recommend it, with a warning that its oddness can sometimes make the feelings harder to reach.

John Moulder-Brown’s Mike and Jane Asher’s Susan give us people to attend to amid that uncertainty. The interest lies in watching them without assuming that youth makes someone innocent or that attraction makes someone understandable. Asher is particularly well suited to a film that resists making another person entirely available to us. The performances benefit from our uncertainty, though there are stretches when we want more ordinary human contact and less unease.

Charly Steinberger’s cinematography makes the swimming-pool setting important to how we experience the film, rather than merely somewhere for it to happen. The images encourage us to notice the discomfort of bodies occupying a shared space. We felt uneasy watching the pool scenes because that physical openness offers so little reassurance about what anyone feels. The dreamlike atmosphere works most effectively when it sharpens this recognisable embarrassment; it is less helpful when we become chiefly conscious of the film being peculiar.

Barrie Vince’s editing has a difficult balance to maintain between comedy and disturbance. The shifts can be disarming, denying us the comfortable pause in which to decide that something was only a joke. That uncertainty is productive for much of the film, but it also asks us to keep adjusting our response. At times the changes of tone become more absorbing than the people experiencing them, which is a limitation in a story so dependent on longing.

The music credited to Cat Stevens and Can belongs to the same unsettled experience. It contributes to the sense that the film will not settle into a single comfortable mood, and that restlessness generally serves it well. Yet the atmosphere is already forceful enough without every element needing to reinforce its peculiarities. We found the film more affecting when we could concentrate on the embarrassment between people rather than on the combined insistence of its effects.

The screenplay by Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza and Bolesław Sulik deserves credit for allowing comedy and sexual discomfort to occupy the same scene without tidying either away. A more reassuring coming-of-age drama might make each awkward encounter a useful lesson. Here, youthful feeling remains difficult, sometimes ridiculous and not automatically deserving of indulgence. The cost is that the writing can seem more interested in sustaining discomfort than in giving us sufficient access to the people involved.

At 92 minutes, this is a compact but demanding choice, especially for anyone expecting the warmth usually offered by stories of youthful discovery. Its humour does not reliably provide relief, and its atmosphere requires some patience. There is enough feeling beneath the strangeness to make that patience worthwhile. Choose it for an evening when an awkward silence afterwards would not be a problem.