Darlingby Anonymous

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August 29, 2005: The great surprise of the 1965 Academy Award ceremonies came when a near unknown British "bird" named Julie Christie was named Best Actress of Year—an honor that had once been the hard earned prize of long-time stars. Christie seemingly came out of nowhere, having been seen briefly in two memorable supporting roles: the swinging English girl who offers Tom Courtenay's modern day Water Mitty a chance to live out his wildest fantasies in "Billy Liar" (1963) and the lovely Irish lass who inspires Sean O'Casey (Rod Taylor) to write great poetry in "Young Cassidy" (1965). The Oscar made it clear Miss Christie would follow James Bond and the Beatles into the pop consciousness of Sixties America, already overcrowded with strong images from Britain. Many people doubted, though, that Christie could even act, for there was the lingering notion that in "Darling," she had merely been employed by Oscar-winning screen writer Frederic Raphael and director John Schlesinger as an extension of her own self—a symbol the amoral, live-for-the-present, media-hyped youth of modern London. By cinematically traveling along Diana's road in life, the filmmakers were able to document a cross-section of modern English types and, by so doing, turn their picture into a work of social commentary without that aspect ever overshadowing our dramatic interests in the central characters. As in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," we see the paparazzi of a major city—the celebrities, the hangers-on, but mostly the ambitious photographers and reporters who chronicle them for the media-hyped and media-hungry public. "Darling" is, more than anything, a movie about the superficiality of the Sixties, all dressed up to look chic and sophisticated, in which the surface of things is readily available from a deluge of media outlets but nothing is explored in depth. This is a movie about the world of the McLuhan prediction: the new order of the complicated media machine presenting only an empty message, the world of form over content, of style over substance. The element that stands out most clearly in "Darling" is the total lack of honest emotions on the part of anyone in the drama. Laurence Harvey's advertising man is too Machiavellian, Dirk Bogarde's TV interviewer too embittered and absorbed in self-defeat, and Christie's model too totally amoral to feel anything honest or meaningful for another person, or for that matter, to elicit a strong feeling from us. In 1965 "Darling" appeared cold and strange, impossible to reconcile with the conventional films in which we feel strongly about almost everyone—even the heavies. But "Darling" would set a pace for the films of the latter half of the decade: cool, clinical, clever, and committed to the theme of lack of commitment. This, of course, had already been explored in the films of important, artistic filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, whose pictures had impressed intellectual moviegoers with their ability to capture the empty, amoral ambiance of the Sixties. But these films appealed almost exclusively to intellectuals. With "Darling," the commercial cinema suddenly appeared to be catching up. "Darling" contained explicit four letter words, graphic bedroom scenes, and most significant of all, a refusal to offer any simple moral conclusion about this ennui-ridden existence. By closely studying...