Deep End is an independent Polish film, but director Jerzy Skolimowski got a glimpse of Hollywood when he appeared in Avengers Assemble.
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Deep End is Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1970 cult classic in which 15-year-old Mike (John Moulder-Brown) starts his first job at a London bathhouse. There’s grime on the walls and the place is filled with unseemly misfits and creepy swimming instructors. Mike is immediately smitten with Susan (Jane Asher), who attends to the female baths, only for the film to become darker and more surreal as she drifts further away from Mike’s fantasy of who she should be.
Deep End feels very British, but the London-set film comes from Polish writer/director Jerzy Skolimowski. In fact, only a minimal amount of the film was even shot in London, with the majority of the shoot taking place in Munich.
In spite of a strong critical response, the film struggled to make an impact with audiences on release. Rights issues would prevent its rediscovery for some time; as other films were gaining notoriety through home video releases Deep End floated out of consciousness. The BFI would rerelease a remastered version of the film in 2011, more than 40 years after its initial release. Finally, this film was more widely available, leading to greater recognition and appreciation.
Bizarrely, though, even those who did catch up with Deep End in 2011 are more likely to recognise writer/director Skolimowski from a minor scene in a film he didn’t write or direct, one in which he gets outfoxed by one of Earth’s mightiest heroes. Just a year after the rerelease of Deep End Skolimowski appeared in a small role in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (Avengers Assemble in the UK). It’s hard to imagine a film more different than Deep End than a Marvel superhero team up.
“They must have me on some Russian villain list,” Skolimowski told The Guardian in 2022, referencing similar acting roles he’s taken over the years.
The two films are strong examples of extremely different kinds of filmmaking. The Avengers is a grandstanding blockbuster, broad and full of light quips and CGI action. Deep End is small, unique and told in the voice of its writer and director.
“I was never before even on the set of such a big production. I was rather curious to observe the technique of working, the procedures, the discipline. Different scale, almost different attitude. It was a factory – a factory producing perfect product that was really planned down to the last element, and executed precisely. I could never do this: I am always open to something happening, to improvisation,” Skolimowski explained in that 2022 Guardian piece.
Starting his career as a writer of prose and poetry, Skolimowski began writing for the screen in a collaboration with celebrated filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (who was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2000) on the 1960 film Innocent Sorcerers. Soon moving into directing shorts and then features, Skolimowski became a director revered in his own right. In particular, the Cannes Film Festival has celebrated his work, with his films earning several nominations and winning best screenplay (Moonlighting (1982)) and the jury prize (EO (2023)) awards. With a career behind the camera that spans from the mid-sixties to today, he is one of Poland’s most noted filmmakers.
All of which only makes it weirder that he popped up as a goon in The Avengers.
Deep End is a fascinating film. At times light and warm, it disorients you with its subtle shifts into surrealism and humorous depictions of quite dark subject matter. It’s set in a run-down London, with peeling paint and muted colours and is about real dirt-under-the-fingernails characters.
While Deep End certainly looks like a snapshot of a time and a place (filming location be damned), its themes and story content are surprisingly modern. At the bathhouse Mike segues from school into his first job, only to be sexualised and assaulted by the everyday predators that surround him, which he’s informed by his co-worker is part of the job and how they make tip money. “You don’t have to do anything,” Susan tells him. “Just go along with the gag…”
Skolimowski’s heightened and melodramatic depiction of Mike’s crush on Susan and how softly it turns into a dangerous obsession hinged on power balances might now be considered to be a too-on-the-nose depiction of incel culture. He finds himself shocked and disempowered by the way society is sexualised, becoming angry and embittered as he’s unable to manifest or even understand his confused ideals of relationships and sex.
For all its humour, endearing character work and shocking content, Deep End is a film that leaves its audience reckoning with the overwhelming sadness and hopelessness of its story.
Strangely, Deep End is also notable a supporting role as unexpected as that of Skolimowski in Avengers. In a decidedly unglamourous appearance, 1950s bombshell Diana Dors appears in a small but impactful role as a perverted, football-obsessed bathhouse customer. It’s an impressive turn, the scene perfectly capturing the strange and comic feel with which Skolimowski freuqently approaches his often uncomfortable and unpleasant subject matter.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2011, Skolimowski gushed about working with Dors. “What a lady!”
“Casting her was such an event. When she put on the ridiculous costume we had prepared, she looked at herself in the mirror and said, ‘So. This is how you see me?’ I said, ‘You look fantastic!'”
While an auteur director having a side-line in acting in more mainstream fare is hardly unique (Werner Herzog has appeared in both Star Wars and Jack Reacher), in this case the two films tell a story together. The rerelease of Deep End and the release of Avengers highlight two distinct poles of cinema in just a brief window of time, and they’re both great examples of what they are.
Cinema can brightly coloured superhero movies or more nuanced and insightful stories of humanity. The world is a richer place for having both these movies in it.
Deep End screens BFI Southbank, London, as part of the BFI and Kinoteka’s Jerzy Skolimowski season, which runs until 29 April, and is available on BFI Player.
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