Darling 1965

 

The first time I saw this movie I was 18 years old and went with a friend to the long gone Art Theatre in Greenwich Villiage to see it. I had started to go to the village at around the age of 15 mainly in the afternoons and I had also started to see more “adult movies” usually at our local “art” theatre The Astor which was on Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn. I was looking for sophistication in my life and I found some of it in this engaging film. I thought it was wonderful at the time, so adult and knowing and I fell forward towards Julie Christie in a fantasy sexual way.

Happily upon seeing the film again after so many years I can raise my hand with reasonable delight over it. Sure its dated and sometimes the director John Schlesinger uses a heavy hand in the many instances of irony that he was known for using in his movies. Its here in the charity ball scenes with all the opulent wealth and privilege rubbing up against the young male “negro” servers dressed in 18^th century costumes. The irony begins right at the start of the film when a billboard about hunger in African is being covered up with one of Julie Christie as the most recent cover girl of a fashion magazine and the subject of an interview which winds its way through the movie. The contradictions between what she says and what is shown abounds with falsehoods and fiction.

Privilege and disgust rub up against each other in this world of glamour and glitz in swinging London and we are viewers and voyeurs when Christie as Diana Scott moves and shakes her way up the image market and ladder. Diana is shameless in her need to be known and seen and she uses her extraordinary beauty to get what she wants and what she thinks she needs.

This was Julie Christie's big breakthrough movie, the one that got her an Oscar and world wide attention. No doubt about her being marvelous in the film, and her beauty was boundless and breathtaking. She starts her climb with her relationship with Dirk Bogarde who is a journalist and very very serious, he is also terrific in this role. The problem with Diana is that she is basically superficial and flighty, and easily bored. Bogarde has weight and demand and he even leaves his wife and children to move in with her. Doomed from the start this relationship goes quickly down the tubes especially when Diana lands on the snake and rake played by Laurence Harvey a public relations executive who takes Diana on and turns her into a fashion model-star and drains her of any humanity that she still has. But she is a willing host.

The film is far from perfect and some of the sequences are almost laughable especially the “La Dolce Vita” like party where the guests play a truth game that gets wilder as the evening progresses with some of the men getting up in drag. There is the usual cliched predatory lesbian drooling over Diana which was common in the early and mid sixties, but the gay Schlesinger evens this out with one of the best realistic depictions of a gay man seen so far at that time and was well played by Robert Curram as Diana's photographer friend who she takes a short holiday to Italy with. Both of them have a sex romp with a hot Italian bi waiter (alas not at the same time) and she also meets a prince who she will later marry and becomes a real princess which brought to mind another princess named Diana especially in the scenes of a depressed Christie wandering through her palatial palace lost but not found.

This was John Schlesinger's 3^rd film, he had previously directed two lovely “kitchen sink” movies “A Kind of Loving” and “Billy Liar” which was a mini miracle film for Christie. Schlesinger received his first directing Oscar nomination for “Darling” and would win best director one at the end of the decade for “Midnight Cowboy” along with a final Oscar nomination for his masterpiece “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Besides winning Christie an Oscar the film also won the original screenplay and black and white costume Oscars. One of the ten best films of 1965.