Brave, bold, and utterly of its time, Deep End lurches uncontrollably between comedy, horniness, drama, and anxiety, just like the doe-eyed teen at its heart, offering us a coming-of-age movie that defies labels and reminds us just how horrific first love and first lust can be.
Life as a teenager is a complex and uncertain journey of thrills, new experiences, uncontrollable desires, fear, and anxiety. It is a time in our lives that most of us, by our forties, would be happy to forget as we look back on the choices we made and the actions we took with a mixture of belly laughs and horror.
Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End long sat on the fringes of cinematic discussion, forgotten, lost and disregarded by critics and the public alike. But in recent years, Deep End has finally earned the praise it deserved as a masterful reflection of just how messy and confusing teenage life can be when desire, lust and jealousy take hold of our adolescent minds and bodies.
Skolimowski’s film is set in and around a public swimming pool, where teenage Mike (John Moulder-Brown), fresh out of school, has just taken a job as an assistant. Here, in the sterile corridors, changing rooms and private cubicles, Deep End quickly lives up to its title as young Mike dives headfirst into desire. The object of Mike’s uncontrollable and urgent lust is an older colleague, Susan (Jane Asher), who toys with Mike’s desires, viewing his puppy love as nothing more than an innocent game. However, all games come with risks, and Mike is naive to the sexual gameplay surrounding him and the outcomes of pursuing Susan to the ends of the Earth, or Soho, at least!
Brave, bold, and utterly of its time, Deep End lurches uncontrollably between comedy, horniness, drama, and anxiety, just like the doe-eyed teen at its heart, offering us a coming-of-age movie that defies labels and reminds us just how horrific first love and first lust can be.
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