Humaira Grant
It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
Philippa
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
tieman64
John Schlesinger's perhaps the only film director to mail feces to a critic. The critics loved "Darling", though, his 1965 film starring Julie Christie as Diana Scott, a vapid model who rises to the top of London's fashion scene. Like many British films at the time ("The Prime of Miss Jean Brody" et al), "Darling's" very much a reaction to a changing London. And so in response to women's rights, feminist movements, and a growth in "liberal" attitudes toward religion, sex, contraceptives, marriage and abortion, came films like "Darling", in which sex, independence, non-committance, glamour, money and female desires are seen to be "bad", "bad", "bad". Veering away from traditional morals and conservative values, in other words, leads to broken families, superficiality, advertisement junkies who worship at the cult of celebrity and brain dead independent women. A year later the British film "Alfie" would tell the same tale, only now with a vapid male lead. A decade later American cinema would begin to do the same ("Kramer vs Kramer" and various reactionary "women's pictures").What seems like a simple, prudish moral agenda, however, is made complicated by screenwriter Frederic Raphael. He juxtaposes glamorous billboards, cocktail parties, social climbers and extravagant wealth with African butlers and "World Relief" banners. Elsewhere Diana's philandering is shown to break up marriages and her "casual scheming" is shown to hurt various people. Actions have consequences, then, and desires are oft petty and selfish at best, harmful at worst. Thanks to Raphael's pen, what seems reactionary in the civil rights era now seems precedent to Generation Facebook. Interestingly, the film's plot is almost identical to 1933's "Baby Face", the Depression Era tale of a social climber who debases herself and abuses everyone in her way, all in the pursuit of fame and cash.Whilst "Darling's" first half is satirical, its second half is mostly weak soap opera. Here Diana is ruthlessly punished for her aspirations – desires the film never acknowledges are forced upon her - and finally ends up a lonely woman with seven stepchildren. Schlesinger and Raphael perhaps want you to see this as a form of comeuppance, of justice, but get more than they bargain for with Christie. Her "villain" emerges as a sympathetic character.7/10 – Worth one viewing.
Rockwell_Cronenberg
Julie Christie won her only Oscar for her performance in John Schlesinger's Darling, and it's easy to see why. Her Diana Scott commands the screen, with Christie's iconic beauty becoming a fixation for men and women alike as she sleeps her way around the London scene. She goes through many different affairs, from the mature and emotional journalist played by Dirk Bogarde to the cynical ad executive played by Laurence Harvey and several others, none of them being enough to keep her grounded in one place.It's a tale of a woman sleeping her way to the top, moving from circle to circle and losing herself along the way. Diana Scott is a deplorable character, moving around from man to man with no regard for the consequences of her actions, constantly bored and doing whatever she wants just to keep company around her, but Christie manages to make her compelling rather than grating. She has a transfixing presence that keeps your eyes glued to her even when you want to reach in there and slap her across the face.Schlesinger's style is a clever mix of dark drama with the swinging style of London the '60s, effectively combining several genre elements into a well-paced product. The dynamics in the film seem commonplace now, but I was impressed by how innovative some of the approach was for this kind of understated drama. Like he did a few years later in his films Midnight Cowboy and Sunday Bloody Sunday, Schlesinger paved the way for homosexuality in mainstream cinema here, presenting characters of all sexual orientations (straight, gay and some seemingly in the middle) as bluntly as any other. One wouldn't take notice of it now but for it's time period and it's prominence, Schlesinger made some bold moves here.The film is Christie's show, but the supporting cast does strong work as well. Bogarde commands the screen whenever he's on it and steals the most dramatic scene in the film from Christie, a smoldering display of rage and passion. Harvey's character is cold and detached, but he plays it with a smug coolness that is endlessly watchable. There's nothing about the film that resonates too strongly, but it's an impressive work all around, building around a shallow and amoral character to a film that is anything but.
mukava991
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.
patrick powell
It is not original to observe that nothing dates faster than last year's fashion, but in the case of John Schlesinger's Darling that observation is very apt. Time has not been kind to this three-Oscars winner, and as the years roll by, time gets ever more cruel. There are some films from 40/50/60 years ago which still stand up, for many reasons, each time you see them, but Darling is left far behind. Made in 1965, I suspect it was seen as 'daring' and 'modern' with its, for the time, open attitude to sex and its less than discreet treatment of homosexuality. The film was released two years before gay sex was decriminalised in Britain, but gayness permeates the whole enterprise. Schlesinger, Dirk Bogarde and Roland Curram were all gay, and even Laurence Harvey, who in his private life was also something of a heterosexual wolf and married three times, also batted for both sides and all too often comes over as camp a row of tents. The film is credited as being the brainchild of Schlesinger, Joseph Janni, the producer and Frederic Raphael, who also wrote the screenplay, and one feels that they were rather taken with the idea of being 'shocking'. Elsewhere this has been described as a 'satire' on swinging London, but if that is the case, whatever satire was intended pretty much passed me by. The trouble is that despite its three Oscars - for Julie Christie, for Raphael's script and for the costumes - it just isn't very good. The whole enterprise is two dimensional and there is no character development at all. We care not a jot for the characters (except, in my case, the Italian prince. There might be hints that he, too, is a bit of a cad and no one in his right mind would buy his explanation that when he is in Rome, he will be sharing a mug of Horlicks with his mum and watching the ten o'clock news. Nevertheless, I did feel sorry for him that he had landed himself with such a high-maintenance new bride.) Darling herself - Diana Scott - comes over as rather too nice to be the amoral model sleeping her way to the top, or if not 'nice' then 'well brought up'. You get the feeling that her idea of doing something really bad would be to forget to write a thank-you note. She also seems rather too dim to be a scheming hussy, and I don't for a second buy the idea that she was merely interested in her modelling career. She had wannabe shires housewife written all over her. As for Dirk Bogarde, am I really the only guy to think that he is all too often very wooden, that when he acts, he is all to obviously 'acting'? He was perfect for all those lightweight Doctor comedies which kept the British nation quiet in the Fifties, but when he branched out into 'serious' roles, he couldn't quite seem to cut it. It will not have been public knowledge at the time that Bogarde, too, was gay - as a former matinée idol, he had a formidable female following - but he remains wholly unconvincing as a 'wronged man'. And furthermore as a cad arts journalist who selfishly jettisoned his wife and three children to shack up with a spoilt model, he does not deserve too much of our sympathy. Every time he got upset or angry with Julie Christie, he just seemed like a middle-aged queen in a spat with his lover. Laurence Harvey, comes over rather better as the cynical and amoral seducer, but he, too, has too many quotable lines to make the part feel normal. (Incidentally, Janni was Italian and his background was much in the realistic school of film-making, so it is ironic that, despite its would-be trendy facade, Darling's heritage all to often comes over as the brittle, old-fashioned middle class stage drama the kitchen sink school was intended to usurp.) Raphael's script is far too full of attempted epigrams and quotable quotes. It is far, far too self-conscious and clever-clever for its own good. I only watched this film because I got hold of a free DVD of it at the office, and I don't feel my life would have been any the poorer had I not seen it. It simply isn't half as good in retrospect as it was thought to be at the time. These things happen. Sad, but true. If this comes your way, either on TV or stuck inside your daily newspaper, first of all see whether you might not have something better to do. Don't be fooled by the Oscars. Oh, and why is sodomy and odd sexual practice always associated with 'being sophisticated'. Does that mean the rest of us are plain old unsophisticated hicks?
