Darling review – Julie Christie’s romantic satire of swinging 60s has a terrific punch

Christie won an Oscar for her role in John Schlesinger’s film as an insouciant model caught between two lovers at the height of London’s fashion sceneSome of it feels a bit dated now, and that brittle, sophisticated chatter in the cocktail party scenes has a fingernails-down-the-blackboard screechiness that can’t have been intended at the time. But John Schlesinger’s winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London now on rerelease for its 60th anniversary.Julie Christie plays Diana Scott, a model and actor who enjoys an insouciantly upward rake’s progress in smart-set London: an innocent, almost childlike Becky Sharp-type character, for all her dissolute encounters, and abortion and divorce are notably presented without sorrowing dismay and disapproval. The wry, Oscar-winning screenplay from Frederic Raphael imports and anglicises the influence of Godard, Resnais, Varda and the French New Wave; fashion models and advertising are vitally important; there is a media interview with a writer (English author and don Hugo Dyson has a cameo as a supposed author of provincial decency and integrity); and we get the occasional gloomy brooding about the bomb. Interestingly, however, the scenes set in Paris where Diana witnesses a live sex show, are a rather saucer-eyed English view of the naughty French, and would never pass muster in an actual French film. Having said which, Schlesinger manages freeze-frame images quite as well as the continentals. Continue reading...

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