Deep end (film)

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Movie
German title Deep end
Original title Deep end
Country of production Great Britain
West Germany
original language English
Publishing year 1970
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Jerzy Skolimowski
script Jerzy Gruza
Jerzy Skolimowski
Boleslaw Sulik
production Helmut Jedele
music Can
Cat Stevens
camera Charly Steinberger
cut Barrie Vince
occupation

Deep End is a British-German film drama by Polish Nouvelle Vague director Jerzy Skolimowski from 1970, set in London's East End during the " Swinging Sixties ".

action

London in the late 1960s: 15-year-old high school dropout Mike accepts a job at a public bathing establishment. There he meets the pretty Susan, who is seven years older than him and immediately casts a spell over him. The still virgin Mike is overwhelmed by the erotically heated atmosphere in the swimming pool - he is sexually molested by a middle-aged woman, for example - and has an increasing obsession for Susan.

Both her fiancé Chris and her lover, a married sports teacher, treat Susan like a sex object, both relationships are turbulent and changeable. She takes out her aggression on Mike, whom she confuses with her occasionally flirtatious, but more often dismissive behavior. She makes fun of being in love because she doesn't love anyone herself and is just as helpless as the boy. Mike eagerly watches as she flirts with other men. When Susan and her boyfriend go to the movies one evening, they are followed by Mike trying to touch their breasts in the dark. Another time he discovers a cardboard display in front of a strip club that looks very much like Susan. He steals it and doesn't let go of it, not even when he meets Susan shortly afterwards. Later he uses the cardboard display to act out his sexual fantasies in the swimming pool and plays with it underwater.

When Mike finally puts broken glass under Susan's car to prevent her meeting with her lover, the two of them have an argument. In the event of a physical attack, the diamond on her engagement ring loosens and lands in the snow. Together they fill the snow in plastic bags and take it to an empty swimming pool at the bathing establishment to melt it.

While Susan is on the phone with her fiancé, Mike finds the diamond. He undresses and drapes himself naked in the large, empty basin of the institution with the diamond on his tongue and waits for Susan. He only wants to give her the diamond if she gives herself to him. First she wants to leave, but thinks about it again, undresses without words, he hands her the stone, she carefully puts it in her handbag and then lies down next to Mike on the floor of the pool. In his confusion and disorientation, he cannot react appropriately and does not even kiss her. She cannot respond to him with feeling. When she gets up to get dressed, Mike orders her to stay and not go back to her fiancé. He intensifies his excited obsession and hurls a ceiling lamp at Susan’s head, whereupon she passes out and finally, as the basin slowly fills with water, drowns. He doesn't help her. And only when her body is already lifeless does he hug her underwater - like in a repetition of the scene with the cardboard stand.

background

The scenes played in the changing rooms were created in the Müller Volksbad

Deep End had a relatively short production history, barely six months from conception of the plot to the end of filming. Jerzy Skolimowski wrote the script shortly after he had to leave Poland for political reasons, together with his Polish compatriot Jerzy Gruza . Since both still spoke bumpy English, they hired the Polish Boleslaw Sulik , who was already fluent in English, as translator of the script and third scriptwriter. Skolimowski structured the script in such a way that the entire plot only takes one (working) week - the film starts on a Monday morning and the film ends on a Sunday evening. In the finished film, this time structure is not immediately apparent. Jerzy Skolimowski made a cameo in the film in the Hitchcockian style as a passenger in the subway reading a communist newspaper - ironic in that Skolimowski was forced to emigrate by the communist rulers in Poland.

The shooting took place in Munich and then in London. Munich was chosen as the location because the Bavaria Studios located there were the main financiers of the film. In Munich, in addition to the Bavaria Studios in the Müller Volksbad and the race scene in the English Garden . The Müllersche Volksbad was the backdrop for the changing rooms and corridors of the swimming pool. Since the Müllersche Volksbad had a very well-kept appearance, the hallways and changing rooms had to be worked on by the production designers to give the appearance of a run-down bathroom. Many of the members of the film crew were also German and then flew to London to continue filming, where the recordings were completed after a total of just under a month of shooting. The scenes that take place next to and in the pool were created in the already worn out swimming pool at Cathall Road Baths in the London borough of Waltham Forest . Most of the night scenes were also shot in London, for example on the famous Berwick Street in Soho .

The soundtrack was provided by the Cologne band Can and the British singer Cat Stevens . Can's piece of music Mother Sky can be heard for a few minutes in the night sequence set in Soho. Director Skolimowski was Cat Stevens claims to be for his composition the phrase "I Might Die Tonight" (German: I'm dying maybe tonight ), as this would suit the movie content. Stevens finally wrote the song But I Might Die Tonight , which underlines the emotional world of the main character Mike and is also included on Stevens' fourth studio album Tea for the Tillerman .

Deep End is often placed in a row with productions such as Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up or Roman Polański's Disgust , which also deal with the swinging London of the 1960s. The German film journalist Robert Fischer shot the 75-minute documentary Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End , published in 2011 , which deals with the genesis of the film and interviews some of those involved, such as the two main actors and director Skolimowski.

synchronization

Many of the German-speaking actors like Karl-Michael Vogler as a sports teacher and Dieter Eppler from Hausmeister can be heard in the German dubbed version with their own voices. Angelika Bender spoke for Jane Asher as Susan, while Tommi Piper lent the voice to Chris Sandford as Susan's fiancé.

criticism

Dieter E. Zimmer wrote for the German premiere in 1971 in Die Zeit that the film was “very easy at first glance, a cinema film that does not inaugurate or presuppose any new viewing habits, but certainly composed down to the last detail and very musical (few people know exactly that Directors dealing with beat), without global statements about zeitgeist or youth, but with tricky psychology: the re-invention of a piece of everyday life in its compulsive extraordinaryness, absurd and ridiculous and pathetic in one, the surprisingly necessary, deep end of what a high feeling wanted to be, in what seemed all too true, lousy situation. "

"Not without flaws and with a somewhat violent melodramatic ending, but altogether seriously and sensitively staged youth portrait."

- film service

While the film was a commercial failure when it was first released, it is now considered a cult film . In 2011 , Andreas Banaski wrote at Spiegel Online that Deep End was initially somewhat forgotten and had hardly been seen for decades, but has been rediscovered in recent years after restoration and DVD release. Banaski praised the camera work by Charly Steinberger (the film looks “just great”) and the soundtrack by Cat Stevens and Can. Jane Asher is "cool" and John Moulder-Brown is "credible", while the supporting roles are often occupied by German actors from TV crime novels. The brief appearance of the former sex symbol Diana Dors as an assaulting woman in the swimming pool is "perhaps the most admirable scene", as Dors would shine "ecstatically". For the director Skolimowski, Deep End remained the high point of his career: "But if you achieve top performance like Deep End once in a lifetime, that's enough."

Awards and nominations

  • 1970: Deep End was admitted to the Venice Film Festival and celebrated its world premiere there on September 1, 1970. According to many observers, the film would have been the favorite for the main prize of the Golden Lion if the competition prizes had not been abolished for a few years from 1969 for democratic reasons.
  • 1972: Jane Asher nominated for Best Actress at the British Society of Film and Television Arts Awards ( BAFTA Awards )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ryan Gilbey: Deep End: pulled from the water . In: The Guardian . May 1, 2011, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed December 23, 2019]).
  2. ↑ Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, documentary on the film
  3. ↑ Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, documentary on the film
  4. ↑ Deep End (1970) - IMDb. Retrieved December 24, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, documentary on the film
  6. ↑ Starting Out: The Making of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End. Retrieved December 24, 2019 .
  7. ↑ German synchronous index | Movies | Deep end. Retrieved December 24, 2019 .
  8. ^ DIE ZEIT (archive): The film "Deep End" by Jerzy Skolimowski: The naturalness of a manslaughter . In: The time . June 11, 1971, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed December 24, 2019]).
  9. ↑ Deep End. Retrieved December 24, 2019 .
  10. ^ Andreas Banaski: Puberty Drama "Deep End": Swimming Pools and Rags . In: Spiegel Online . October 6, 2011 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 24, 2019]).
  11. ↑ Ryan Gilbey: Deep End: pulled from the water . In: The Guardian . May 1, 2011, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed December 24, 2019]).