Customer Reviews

Deep Red [VHS]

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Jerzy Skolimowski wrote this after Polanski's 'Knife in the Water.' His first English language film is an excursion into the mind of a romantic, sexually repressed 15 year old boy (John Moulder-Brown) who is obsessed with a young woman (Jane Asher) who is an habituee of the Newford Bathhouse, where most of the film is shot. In this seedy, watery world, filled with the alienated and maladjusted who live only for sex and sport, the girl of his dreams does 'favors' for those willing to pay. Rebufing the boy's awkward advances, she encourages him to do as she does. Disgusted and fascinated by her apparent contradictions, he longs to take her away from what he conceives as a hellish place of degradation. Skolimowski exhibits real insight into aspects of British character and the film brilliantly shows the dark side of the 'swinging London' of the late 60s, full of foreboding, the imminence of moral collapse, and disenchantment with illusory hedonistic ideals. The young hero, despairing of success in his 'white knight' endeavor, finds pathetic and fleeting satisfaction for his longing with a cardboard cutout of his beloved, foreshadowing and symbolizing the ultimate end of innocence and the substitution of voyeurism and onanism to maintain the faded ideal of romantic love. With Polanski's 'Repulsion' a powerful antidote to adolescent notions of idealized love.