Darling Review – Julie Christie’s Romantic Satire of Swinging 60s Has A Terrific Punch – ryan

Some of the Its Feels a bit dated now, and that brittle, sophisticated chatter in the cocktail parties have a fingernails-down-the-blackboard screechiness that can’t have ben intended at the time. But John Schlesinger’s Winsome Adventure from 1965 Still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London now on Rerelease for its 60th Anniversary.

Julie Christie Plays Diana Scott, a model and actor who enloys an insoucantly upward rake in smart-set London: an Innocent, almost childlik becky charp-type Character, for all her dissolute enCounters, and abortion and divorce are notaboyly present and disaproval. The Wry, Oscar-Winning Screenplay From Frederic Raphael Imports and Anglicis The Influencies of Godard, Resnais, Varda and the French New Wave; fashion models and advertising are vitally imported; There is a media interview with a Writer (English Author and Don Hugo Dyson Has a Cameo as a suppoted author of provincial decency and integrity); and we get the occisional Gloomy brooding about the bomb. Interesting, Howver, The Scenes Set in Paris Where Diana Witnesses a Live Sex Show, Are a Rather Saucer-Eyed English View of the Naughty French, and Wold Pass Muster in An Actual Film. Having Said Which, Schlesinger Freeze-Frame Images Quite As the Continentals.

Christie’s Ingenue is a girl from a good English family, who got Maried Too Young to a Decent but Boring Chap. Soon she is caught between two lovers played by two Acting Thoroughbreds Who Faces Have an Amazing and Sometimes Near-Gargoyle Expression of Worldlines: Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. Bogarde is Robert Gold, Who Fronts an Earnest TV Show About Culture Called Art and You. We see Him Conduction Interviews in the Street About What Passersby Think is Most Shaming in Modern British Society. Schlesing Gives US What Looks Like Hilarious, Genuine Voxpop Footage in Which People Declare That Britain’s Most Shaming Things are, Variously, Traffic Problems and the Prevalence of Homosexuality.

One of Robert’s Interviews is diana who soon finds herself in an extramarital entanglement with Him. Creu to a hotel room, robert hate they claim they ale of buying a suitcase and making it Feel Respectably Heavy for the Bellboy by Covertly Filling It With Copies of the Old London Evening-the Headline of which is an irresistible Madeleine for Non-Swing Brits: All Hope Vanishes.

Without any great agony, Robert leaves his homelly wife and children to move in with diana in her swinging london flat (she is thrilled by the “gorgeous negroes” upststairs, a very 1965 script moment) oleaginous smoothie miles brand, an adman played by Harvey; He gets her on his books and his german clients love Diana’s “Aryan” look. Diana Also Befriends a Gay Fashion Photographer Malcolm (Played by Actor Tourned Author Roland Curram) WHO ACCOMPANIES Her on Holiday.

The film is full of incidental detail that will will flu all fans of bygone britain. Uptight Robert Drives an Austin 1100 (Like the One Beloved of Basil Fawlty) Wheeas Miles Drives A Groovy Volvo Sports Car – The Kind that Roger Moore Had Playing Templar in the Saint. But the parade of irony continues. Miles Gets Diana Promotional Work at A Grotesque Charity Event where People Donate to Famine Relief while Gorging Thems On Food and Wine, and VEE Secures Her a Walk-on Role in a Sub-Hammer Movie. She Also Plays the Role of a Renaissance Principlesa in a Silly TV ad for chocolate, filmed at the palazzo of a suave and recently widowed Italian nobleman who is entrance by diana – and she reaches the grace moment in her Career.

Christie is Always in Danger of Being Upstag by Bogarde and Harvey, Pauting Male Divas Both, and Her Performance is in Fact A Model of Restraint and Self-Effacement Compared with these preening exquisites. Bogarde Shows US A Flash of Something Spiteful and Seven Sinister in the Way He Treats Diana at the Very End, and Also in His Spasm of Jealous Rage and Has Been Cheating on Him, Dragging Her Down an Escalator in the London Underground and Belowing the Word “whore”. The Bland, Amiable, Noncommittal Diana Certainly DOESN’T DEERVE THAT LABEL. IT’S DIRECTED WITH TERRIFIC PUNTING WITH SCHLESSINGER, WHO – AS IN MIDNIGHT COWBOY AND FAR FROM THE MADDING Crowd – has a flair for showing US innocents who wish to survive.

• darling is in uk cinemas from 30 May and on 4K UHD and Blue-Ray From 16 June