Some of it feels a bit dated now, and that brittle, refined chatter within the cocktail occasion scenes has a fingernails-down-the-blackboard screechiness that may’t have been meant on the time. However John Schlesinger’s winsome journey from 1965 nonetheless has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London now on rerelease for its sixtieth anniversary.
Julie Christie performs Diana Scott, a mannequin and actor who enjoys an insouciantly upward rake’s progress in smart-set London: an harmless, virtually childlike Becky Sharp-type character, for all her dissolute encounters, and abortion and divorce are notably offered with out sorrowing dismay and disapproval. The wry, Oscar-winning screenplay from Frederic Raphael imports and anglicises the affect of Godard, Resnais, Varda and the French New Wave; trend fashions and promoting are vitally essential; there’s a media interview with a author (English writer and don Hugo Dyson has a cameo as a supposed writer of provincial decency and integrity); and we get the occasional gloomy brooding in regards to the bomb. Curiously, nonetheless, the scenes set in Paris the place Diana witnesses a reside intercourse present, are a fairly saucer-eyed English view of the naughty French, and would by no means go muster in an precise French movie. Having mentioned which, Schlesinger manages freeze-frame pictures fairly in addition to the continentals.
Christie’s ingenue is a woman from a superb English household, who bought married too younger to a good however boring chap. Quickly she is caught between two lovers performed by two appearing thoroughbreds whose faces have an incredible and generally near-gargoyle expression of worldliness: Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. Bogarde is Robert Gold, who fronts an earnest TV present about tradition known as Artwork and You. We see him conducting interviews on the street about what passersby assume is most shaming in trendy British society. Schlesinger offers us what appears like hilarious, real voxpop footage wherein folks declare that Britain’s most shaming issues are, variously, site visitors issues and the prevalence of homosexuality.
One in every of Robert’s interviewees is Diana who quickly finds herself in an extramarital entanglement with him. Once they go to a lodge room, Robert has to fake they’re a married couple by shopping for a suitcase and making it really feel respectably heavy for the bellboy by covertly filling it with copies of the previous London Night Information – the headline of which is an irresistible madeleine for non-swinging Britain: MINERS – ALL HOPE VANISHES.
With none nice agonising, Robert leaves his homely spouse and youngsters to maneuver in with Diana in her swinging London flat (she is thrilled by the “attractive negroes” upstairs, a really 1965 script second) and Robert introduces her to a sublime new stratum of society the place she meets oleaginous smoothie Miles Model, an adman performed by Harvey; he will get her on his books and his German purchasers love Diana’s “Aryan” look. Diana additionally befriends a homosexual trend photographer Malcolm (performed by actor turned writer Roland Curram) who accompanies her on vacation.
The movie is stuffed with incidental element that can grip all followers of bygone Britain. Uptight Robert drives an Austin 1100 (just like the one beloved of Basil Fawlty) whereas Miles drives a fab Volvo sports activities automotive – the type that Roger Moore had taking part in Simon Templar in The Saint. However the parade of ironies continues. Miles will get Diana promotional work at a grotesque charity occasion the place folks donate to famine reduction whereas gorging themselves on meals and wine, and even secures her a walk-on function in a sub-Hammer film. She additionally performs the function of a Renaissance principessa in a foolish TV advert for chocolate, filmed on the palazzo of a suave and not too long ago widowed Italian nobleman who’s entranced by Diana – and he or she reaches the Grace Kelly second in her profession.
Christie is at all times in peril of being upstaged by Bogarde and Harvey, pouting male divas each, and her efficiency is in actual fact a mannequin of restraint and self-effacement in contrast with these preening exquisites. Bogarde exhibits us a flash of one thing spiteful and even sinister in the best way he treats Diana on the very finish, and in addition in his spasm of jealous rage when he realises she has been dishonest on him, dragging her down an escalator within the London underground and bellowing the phrase “whore” in that refined voice. The tasteless, amiable, noncommittal Diana actually doesn’t deserve that label. It’s directed with terrific punch with Schlesinger, who – as in Midnight Cowboy and Removed from the Madding Crowd – has a aptitude for displaying us innocents who want to survive.
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