Julie Christie is the ultimate 1960s’ party girl in an Oscar-winning turn as Diana Scott, a young and beautiful model and actress. Luck, fortune and love come knocking at every given opportunity, only for them to become a perpetual source of disappointment. A thoroughly engaging, whirlwind portrait of a magnetic figure, who captures the zeitgeist, as well the excesses of a cultural moment. Director John Schlesinger’s film is an emblem of London’s Swinging Sixties, as well as a critique of the ephemerality of such a youth-driven revolutions, the proclaimed care-free attitudes and fun-loving hedonism.
As we follow Diana’s exuberant and sensational life trajectory, coloured by self-created chaos, hopping from lover to lover to the next, breaking up marriages and families in the process. The ’60s appear as an effervescent time for art and creative exploration, from London to Paris to an Italian riviera, Diana’s tribulations are backgrounded by gallery openings, elaborate photoshoots, film sets to high-society hobnobbing. Career and life opportunities of which others could only dream, only for her to comedically breeze through them in her mindless stride and likely to dump them at her peril for no other reason than whim.
Schlesinger appears to queer code the entire film, at points fairly openly – Diana’s gay photographer friend hooking up with a local Italian waiter. It offers a brief but insightful look into queer life that was likely burgeoning at the time. From a certain vantage point Diana could be seen as a refined version of the fag hag stereotype; equal parts fabulous, equal parts tragic and endlessly adorned by gay men. But a dose of reality comes from snappily edited documentary clips of vox pops – a nod to Jean-Luc Godard – by Diana’s main love interest journalist Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde in usual debonair, low-key form). Interview snippets with various joe blogs from the street voice concerns of rampant homosexuality taking over London. Schlesinger would then go on to direct Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), the earliest widely released American films to showcase homosexual relationships.
Yet it’s with on her own arena that Diana’s tolerance is tested. A debauched Parisian hotel-room party – the scene bares a semblance to Fellin’s 8 ½ (1963) is initially met with trepidation. A wild evening of strip dance mind games, cross dressing, cornered by a lesbian admirer, and her sexually ambiguous lover Miles (Laurence Harvey) kissing another woman. Or in a later scene, we see queasiness when Miles attempts to go down on her. But she then appears to adjust and amalgamate accordingly. As well as her unease with the prospect of having children – it is inferred she has an abortion – and her reluctance to marry Robert reveal a fearless autonomy indifferent to societal propriety.
The story wraps up with a very surprising and subversive role reversal. Just like the film, a real rarity for its time.
A sharp and crisp 60th anniversary 4k restoration of Darling is in cinemas on Friday, May 30th, and on 4K UHD and Blu-ray on Monday, June 16th.
