Soul Desert, Parts One and Two: Jerzy Skolimowski's 1971 Deep End

DEEP END 

(Jerzy Skolimowski, UK, 1971, 35mm, 90 mins.) 

John Moulder-Brown 

Prologue A soundtrack that eclipses the film with which it's associated is not an anomaly. Pink Floyd's More (1969) is a case in point. Though I've owned the CD for years, I still haven't watched Barbet Schroeder's drug-filled debut. Due to a combination of distribution problems and rights issues, Deep End has been difficult to see for decades. What distinguishes the title from other musically-oriented cult classics is that it features very little music. But that music has taken on a life of its own. 

Part I 

No band in the world illustrates the inadequacies of today's musical terminology more than Can.--Derek Jewel, The Sunday Times (1974) 

I had been looking forward to seeing Jerzy Skolimowski's second English-language effort ever since I discovered Can's stunning collection, Soundtracks, in 1982. Twenty-six years is a long time to wait to see--or do--anything. Well...it was worth the wait. And then some. In fact, it's unlikely I'll see a better film this year. 

When I was involved with college radio in the 1980s, the Cologne-based band was a revelation like no other. Public Image Limited and the Fall were something, but Can was something else altogether (and they count the Fall's Mark E. Smith and PiL's Jah Wobble among their many fans).

   

The first record I heard was 1980's handy confabulation of odds and sods, Cannibalism I. Then came 1970's Soundtracks, an enduring favorite. As the title indicates, it's also an assemblage, rather than a proper album. In this case, each song corresponds to a specific Eastern European film (all five appear in the cover illustration above). The jewel in the crown is the 14-minute "Mother Sky" featuring Japan's Kenji "Damo" Suzuki, a former street musician (their original singer was American sculptor Malcolm Mooney).

Just as Peter Whitehead deploys Floyd's magnum opus, "Interstellar Overdrive," so artfully in 1967's Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, Skolimowski gives "Mother Sky" pride of place in Deep End.

Like UK contemporaries Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, Can poached from pop, jazz, and experimental music. And like Brian Eno, with whom drummer Jaki Liebezeit would collaborate, they sound like they're from another time--possibly even another world (pun intended). The word "psychedelic" doesn't cut it. Then again, Mooney and Suzuki sang in their own unique argot, and bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt studied with the late Karlheinz Stockhausen. Numerous alternative acts, from Stereolab to LCD Soundsystem, have drawn inspiration from the quintet. Rapper Kanye West even samples them on 2007's Graduation, but nobody sounds exactly like "the Can." Or ever will.

Post-Suzuki Can 

As with Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), Deep End looks at Swinging London from the outside in. But just as Blow-Up doesn't feel Italian, the Munich-filmed Deep End doesn't feel Polish or German any more than Roman Polanski's UK-situated Repulsion (1966) did. [Skolimowski co-wrote Polanski's 1962 debut, Knife in the Water.] 

As David Thompson stated in last August's Sight & Sound ("75 Hidden Gems: The Films That Time Forgot"), "The energy of a foreigner tackling British territory easily outweighs misjudgments of class accents, and today the soundtrack by Can and Cat Stevens would probably win a high cool rating." (Moulder-Brown's appealing accent is more plummy than cockney.) These are all thoroughly British films, regardless as to the non-Brits behind the camera--or on the soundtrack. And like the UK-born Whitehead's wide-ranging expose, they're death knells for an era, not celebrations.

   

Can - "Mother Sky" (1969) 

Part II 

And if you have five seconds to spare Then I'll tell you the story of my life: Sixteen, clumsy and shy I went to London and I I booked myself in at the Y ... W.C.A. I said: "I like it here--can I stay? I like it here--can I stay? And do you have a vacancy For a back-scrubber?"--The Smiths, "Half a Person"

 

I became acquainted with the Smiths' "Half a Person" five years after Can courtesy 1987's double-disc set Louder than Bombs. I didn't know it then, but after watching Deep End, it occurred to me that Morrissey's sad lament could almost be a loose adaptation of Skolimowski's sixth film, even if Moulder-Brown's Mike is 15 rather than 16. Further, he works in the Newford Bath House, rather than the YWCA, but he is indeed a "back scrubber." He's also "clumsy and shy." 

In strictly cinematic terms, Mike's a more dangerous cousin to Tom Courtenay's dreamy mortuary attendant in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963). He's cute, he's charming, but--to borrow another word from Morrissey--he's also "morbid." And "pale." Just as Julie Christie's Liz brings out the best in Billy, Jane Asher's Susan brings out the worst in Mike. David Thompson paints Susan as "a divine demi-bitch out for everything she can get." He adds that "Skolimowski's direction is extravagant, crude and tender by turns, slapping the audience in the face with its insouciance and weird wit." 

Deep End begins like a comic gloss on Blow-Up and ends like an art-damaged The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) or If... (1968). But while Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson allowed their angry young men pyrrhic victories against unbeatable foes, Skolimowski's outclassed anti-hero makes his move too late. Mostly, he makes the wrong move.

Next: Part III 

Courtenay and Christie in Billy Liar 

Deep End plays the Northwest Film Forum from 1/18-24, Fri.-Thurs., at 7 and 9:15pm. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. between Pike and Pine. For more information, please click here or call 206-329-2629. Images from the All Music Guide, Amazon, Answers.com, and Subterranean Cinema; video from YouTube.