Darling – (12A) |Close-Up Film Review

When Julie Christie burst onto the cinema screen in 1963 as the free-spirited Liz in Billy Liar it was though she lit the match which fired up the new feeling of freedom for young women in the swinging sixties.  

Two years later director John Schlesinger cast her again, this time in the lead role of Diana Scott in Darling – a young woman who embodies the new sexual freedom of the era, whose idea of fidelity, one character dryly remarks, is not having more than one man at a time in bed. 

The sort of steamy sex scenes we see on the screen today were not yet part of the cinematic language of 1965 however.  Passionate kisses and a girl (not a boy) prancing around in very pretty underwear and use your imagination was the order of the day.  It was all in the acting.

Christie as Diana is dead sexy, drop dead gorgeous and charming with it.  She is discovered by serious television arts journalist Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde).   Besotted, he leaves his wife and children to set up home with Diana.   But then when she meets smoothie advertising man Miles (Laurence Harvey), who can further her career as a model and actress, she leaps into bed with him.  She also takes up with the obligatory gay best friend, photographer (Roland Curram) with whom she goes shoplifting in Fortnam and Mason for kicks.  She ends up as the “bird in a gilded cage” trophy wife of a wealth Italian aristocrat (José Luis de Vilallonga.)   And when she finally realises she can’t always get what she wants through charm, sex and a dazzling smile, you actually feel rather sorry for her. It was indeed a performance worthy of its best actress Oscar.

As the two main men in her life, Harvey is quite skin crawlingly lizard like and Bogarde reminds us of what a fine screen actor he was. In his early forties at the time but looking much younger, he conveys a wealth of thought and feeling simply with an inflexion of his voice or the lift  of an eyebrow. 

The film has been lovingly restored to its original crisp black and white and the sets and costumes are lush, lovely and strangely not dated.  Though as I was there in the sixties, I would say that, wouldn’t I?.  Schlesinger’s direction  is crisp and assured with some sly visual commentary touches, such as the opening shot of a huge poster of Diana’s face being pasted over one of starving children in Africa.  The forthcoming DVD version has some very interesting extras, but it’s worth catching it first on the big screen – the screen where a film is meant to be seen.

IN CINEMAS FROM 30 MAY  

AVAILABLE ON 4K UHD AND BLU-RAY ON 16 JUNE