'Deep End': Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1970 drama was the first of the British films by the author of ‘EO’ and one of the most important works in his oeuvre.

When Jerzy Skolimowski stepped behind the camera in 1970 with Deep End (Na samym dnie), he had already made his foreign debut (Start in 1967, shot in Belgium and awarded the Golden Bear in Berlin) but could still only dream of professional stability and bright prospects. Although it might seem that forced emigration paradoxically improved his situation as a director, the prose of artistic life abroad was quite different. Skolimowski earned $4,000 for Start, which he immediately used to buy a Ford Mustang (later sold to Czesław Niemen), and had to wait more than two years for the chance to make another film.

Deep End proved to be a breakthrough film for him. Although Skolimowski again had a small budget, he was given artistic freedom and the opportunity to work with excellent British actors. The main character, a teenager taking a job in the town’s bathhouse, was played by the charismatic John Moulder-Brown, and the object of his love was played by Jane Asher, who was then Paul McCartney’s (of the Beatles) girlfriend. Charly Steinberger, from Austrian, was behind the camera, and the music – including the opening song – was composed by Cat Stevens.

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Deep End (1970) Trailer - Out Now on BFI DVD & Blu-ray

In Deep End, Skolimowski told the story of fifteen-year-old Mike, who dropped out of school to start working at the town bathhouse. The attractive boy quickly becomes an object of desire for the bathhouse’s aging female customers, while he himself falls madly in love with his work colleague, the beautiful, red-haired Susan, who is a few years older than he. In an attempt to win her heart (and body), the young boy plunges into a love-erotic obsession.

In telling the story of a teenager on the road to sexual initiation, Skolimowski took inspiration from the style of English cinema of the time. Iwona Grodź wrote:

The aesthetics of this film suggest the possibility of placing it in the history of British cinema, going all the way back to the days of English ‘young angst’, with John Schlesinger’s ‘Darling’ (1965) at the forefront. The director repeats, as it were, in a new space and with new actors, the Polish equivalent of this film, ‘Walkower’ [Walkover]. We observe the interest, typical of British cinema of those years, in ordinary people trying to break out of a world of poverty, drudgery and mediocrity. […] The choice of a space with distinctly anti-aesthetic qualities, the para-documentary way in which it is shown and the acting reminiscent of improvisation are features that allow us to place this film among other British productions of the 1960s.

Moving to the Islands, Skolimowski faced new challenges – including the language. And since his English was not perfect at the time, the director decided to bring in two Polish friends to work with him: Jerzy Gruza and Bolesław Sulik, whose proficiency allowed him to adapt the jokes he was making into English. The director had such a small budget at his disposal that the only way to reward his Polish friends was to include their names on the list of co-scriptwriters. Years later, Skolimowski recalled this fact: ‘Truth be told, there shouldn’t have been any names on that script, because it was barely a sketch of what was going to happen.’ For Deep End was created in an atmosphere of improvisation, the scenes grew day by day, and successive inspirations influenced the shape of the film on an ongoing basis.

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Stop frame, ‘Deep End’, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970, photo: culture.pl.

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In an interview with Grażyna Torbicka, the director mentioned, among other things, the film’s characteristic colour scheme, the source of which was a meeting between the director and an actress in one of the shopping malls. When Skolimowski (who is also a painter) saw the red-haired Jane Asher standing next to yellow raincoats, he decided to make the striking contrast between these colours one of the film’s trademarks. The yellow coat became one of the key props, and the colour contrasts filling the frames of the film (the rotten green of the bathhouse walls, the blonde perm of one of the key customers, etc.) were awe-inspiring to David Lynch himself.

Nominated for a BAFTA (for Best Supporting Actress for Jane Asher), Skolimowski’s film was to become one of the most important pictures in the oeuvre of the Polish master of cinema, but it only lived to become a cult film years later. Deep End was also, according to Iwona Grodź:

Skolimowski’s first English-language film made clearly from an outsider’s perspective, [which] strips away any illusions about a Western paradise on earth, revealing the naked truth, the truth about a world and people with an uninteresting past and a dubious future [and shows] a world based on consumption in which there are no values, because even first love can become a bargaining commodity here.

Deep End. Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. Screenplay: Jerzy Skolimowski, Bolesław Sulik, Jerzy Gruza. Cinematography: Charly Steinberger. Production design: Tony Pratt, Max Ott Jr. Music: Cat Stevens. Starring: Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown, Diana Dors.

Translated by Patryk Grabowski