Darling chérie

I had not seen this film since 1965 when I was a college student but remember how electrifying it was to see a young, charismatic Julie Christie at the beginning of her peak years. She's given some great scenes to show off her multi-faceted personality and she throws herself into the amoral model, Diana, who sleeps her way to the top. I can't imagine any other actress who could have done this without being repulsed by her naked greed and amorality. Christie had an inner radiance that makes her likable throughout this ground-setting import from London. England had become a hot movie center during this era, giving us such phenomenal movies like "Georgy Girl," "women in love," "Isadora," and many more. We can see this movie as a time machine which captures the raw energy of that era as our sexuality began to expand into new realms from the staid values of the past. This is a terrific movie to watch from time to time and watch an early phenomenon begin her golden career.

I find this movie unique. If you have read of, or can remember the mid-1960s, you know that the character Julie Christie plays was absolutely the one adored by everyone- by all who considered themselves "in" and "trendy" and "modern". And she is completely taken apart by this movie.

I can think of only one other movie at any time in any language that so thoroughly demolishes the pretensions of the very people whom the smart set aspired to be at the time the movie was coming out. Amazingly that movie was 'Alfie', that came out about that same year. (A movie like La Dolce Vita is in a different mode - the people are the new meretricious post-war haute bourgeois class - a frequent target through history, and in that way, like The Ice Storm or Interiors or American Beauty as an attack on such values).

Virtually all "serious satires" take on targets that the "chattering classes" consider suspect - the hidebound, the hypocritical, the "authority figures" whom youth wish to overturn. Not this one. Astonishingly, in the midst of mod London, the very middle of the swinging 60s, you get a movie that looks at its non-committal "live for the moment" hedonistic experimentation and blasts its moral character with a cannon.

This just doesn't happen in movies - compare say, "If" or "O Lucky Man" or say, "Network" (to name three I like), and you'll see the targets as the familiar powers that be - from school to television. But Julie Christie's character is what people thought was new and wonderful - and its superficiality is blown to bits.

It's as if a movie now were to look at a poor black woman raising a child alone - and blast her for any behavior that contributed to this state. It just won't be done - the sympathies are all running FOR that character. So were the sympathies for the Julie Christie character in that time - and the movie is very very brave in running so utterly against the current.

I just love the movie - it's a step up from Schlesinger's earlier ones -the script is superb, the performances are excellent without exception. (Lawrence Harvey is particularly good - but of course it's Christie's movie).

Do see it. It's also full of wonderfully imaginative touches - such as the ending scene.

Darling (1965)

A black and white, Mod London romance and its aftermath, over and over, with all the tumult and glitz of the times. The events race forward and create a real tornado of activity, centering around one woman, Diana Scott, who is perfectly played by Julie Christie. Diana is as charming and beautiful as the actress who plays her, and she is drawn to men, to the movies, to modeling, and generally to success and ruin, up and down, in a wild ride.

British movies had a vigorous neo-realism (British New Wave) movement in the late 50s and early 60s, and by the time of this film it had segued into a purely celebratory pop mode, cashing in on the times, and the British Invasion in music. "Darling" is kind of in both worlds, I think, the same way the 1964 "A Hard Days Night" is in both, though they are very different films. But there is a frankness to the filming that belies the (at first) entertaining and largely fictional subject. And unlike the earlier neo-real innovators ("Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner" etc.), the focus here is on a privileged class, and on the rising fortunes of Diana as she moves from one relationship to another.

The filming gives these seemingly flighty, alternately glib and sad events a somberness they need. Director John Schlesinger was a British New Wave upstart, and would later do the American masterpiece "Midnight Cowboy," which might be said to have the same mixture of inventive fiction and believable raw realism.

Diana is a superficial woman who cashes in on her good looks and fun temperament, and her many men never seem to mind at first. She leads, but she also get towed along, falling in love, never seeming to be quite as happy as she should. Indeed, the movie begins with her explaining through a voice-over her inner yearning for what matters in life, since it's so hard to otherwise tell. Toward the end, in Italy (after England and France had been exhausted), she says to her newest man, "If I could just feel complete." And she means it. But then, in the next scenes, she's having fun again, telling lies and losing her bearings.

Christie is a marvel, really, even though you might just say she's playing herself (though not acting out the events in her life, we hope). This is her breakout film (along with her next film, "Dr. Zhivago"), and she really does typify the Mod English girl, fresh and carefree. There is even a very brief nude shot, from behind, that is a sign of mid-60s liberation in both life and in filmmaking. Dirk Bogarde is certainly excellent, too, and subtle, and indeed the whole cast is first rate, maybe because everyone is playing their contemporary selves with fictional names.

So the movie is terrific, even if it sometimes seems to keep meandering through the paces over the whole two hours. It wraps you in its world. Inevitably the outcome is as somber as the greys of the filming. What else would happen to someone who can't find love, or happiness, or meaning? It's impossible to really feel complete, as a person, if you search outside yourself too much, and hers is a superficial world of her own making, Diana is a superficial woman with lots of unexplored depth.

The writing here is totally first rate, the filming is first rate, the editing and pace first rate. It's simply a well made movie about a contemporary dilemma. "Thank God it's never too late," she says at the end, and in fact you know that she should really say, "God, everything stays the same." I don't think there is meant to be an echo here of Grace Kelly in particular, but there is a similar arc to Diana's career (and her name, of course, predicts a later Princess Diana). Diana's apparent sexual freedom is laden with that old convention of marriage (which she early on wisely says she doesn't want) and so some extent she can be a freewheeling young woman partly because she is always taken care of, and increasingly so. An interesting take on whether this is an accurate picture at all of the times is in this short apolitical article: www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10813.

This movie ranks, for me, almost up there with "Alfie" and "Georgie Girl" (two of my favorites) as a look at the times in England. Honest, sometimes disturbing, and artistically considered. Don't miss it.

Darling is known generally as an iconic "Sixties" movie. It is at once a product of its time and a still-born anachronism. Though conceived and shot in 1964-65, there is nary a hint of the Beatles and their ilk, who by the time this film went in front of the cameras were unquestionably the major pop cultural phenomenon on earth, and certainly in Britain where this story takes place. The characters who parade before us in this slickly packaged satire are far more evocative of the earlier "La Dolce Vita" period. Perhaps the newly emerging youthful counterculture is absent because the groupings visited here are, in contrast to the many- millioned teenage Beatles fans, older, more rarefied and further up the social ladder in corporate boardrooms, haute-couture industry gatherings, mainstream television production units, the profit-driven B-movie exploitation industry, and the haunts of continental royalty. Sparkling and memorable as it is, the musical scoring by John Dankworth was also dated by mid-1965 when this film came out.

The satire is often from the finger-pointing, underscoring school. Best example: A portly dowager in furs at a charity function stuffs an hors d'oeuvre into her mouth with a bejeweled hand as a speaker pompously thanks those present for fighting the scourge of hunger in the world.

Screenwriter Frederic Raphael and director John Schlesinger organize their material in semi- documentary fashion with voice-over narration by the title character, Diana Scott (Julie Christie) in order to reveal her hypocrisy as she describes various episodes in her life while the unfolding screen actions ironically contradict her words. She portrays herself verbally as innocent, sensible and basically decent when in fact she's selfish, dishonest and miserable. The underlying causes of her selfishness, dishonesty and misery are neither explained nor explored, but she is presented in a way that encourages us to regard her as a micro-consequence of the crass, materialistic, soulless macro-society around her. The episodes in her bumpy road to despair succeed one another briskly enough to keep us diverted and shaking our heads at the imperfect human types on display. The arc of the story takes Diana higher and higher on the material plane until she can rise no more, only to find emptiness at the top. The point seems to be "looks, money and prestige aren't everything – but look how entertainingly we're presenting that platitude."

This film and Doctor Zhivago, released shortly after, made Julie Christie the most honored and publicized actress in the world for about a year and it's interesting to compare her Diana Scott with her Lara character in David Lean's epic. Lean, a stern and experienced taskmaster, got more solid acting out of her. Schlesinger's grip is looser, resulting in a more uninhibited but less disciplined performance. As one flavor of the media-created "It" girls of the Sixties (Ann Margret, Twiggy, Goldie Hawn being other flavors) she embodied a certain attitude toward life that was in the air in the industrialized world in those days, an informality of demeanor which some would call proletarian or others would call "beatnik"; hers was a looser, more naturalistic look, a beauty outside the parlor. Julie Christie was beautiful without a speck of makeup while the wind was blowing her hair in four different directions and seemed to be an entirely different person depending on which angle she presented to the camera or what kind of light was bouncing off her partly chiseled, partly soft and sensuous features. Her very presence lent a depth that may not have been written into the character. With another actress, one can only wonder how effective this film would have been. Her chief fellow players, Laurence Harvey and Dirk Bogarde, give splendid support, as does the rest of the cast. But the spotlight is definitely on Julie; it is her showcase.

Julie Christie deserved her Oscar. So did the scriptwriters--"Should Popes be ancestors?" And no on-screen sex when the film is considerably about sex!

When the lead character becomes a princess one is reminded of Princess Diana's own life. Both are Dianas. A very unusual, complex work from Schlesinger.

I did not appreciate the film when I saw it in the Sixties; now I do. What a great year for Christie--this and "Dr Zhivago."

The social commentary is hard hitting--young black boys serving snacks and drinks to perverted white adults, the facetious interest of the idle rich in feeding the hungry around the world as the rich gobble food they do not need to eat, of rich princes busy renovating their palace's washing closets.