Identification Marks: None: Jerzy Skolimowski

In a way, Jerzy Skolimowski's Identification Marks: None feels like a spiritual companion piece to Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). Both films follow a disillusioned young person as they kill time and fruitlessly busy themselves while awaiting a deadline. Cléo waited for a cancer diagnosis. The protagonist of Skolimowski's film waits for the time he is to report to the military to officially answer his draft summons. The protagonist is identified (no pun on the title intended) as an observer early on as we are treated to scenes where he exists on the periphery of events; he walks past a street fight, he drifts through a club where a group of men play darts and dance, and the audience experiences a curious first-person sequence where he is examined by a draft board. Identification Marks: None has a heightened awareness of the mundane and minutia and understands how such things can consume and preoccupy people undergoing stressful waiting periods. At times it almost develops a stream-of-consciousness approach to the narrative. This was an ambitious feature length film debut for a young director, and it shows.

8/10

Deep End: Jerzy Skolimowski

I'll bet that if you removed the soundtrack from Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End and presented it as a silent film, it could be passed off as a great horror film. Of course, that's just my inner cynic talking. Deep End is a film about young love and near-homicidal obsession. It begins when a 15-year-old named Mike gets a job working at a swimming baths in London. He is subjected to a rather brutal sexual awakening when he discovers Susan, an attendant at the baths who is ten years his elder. She flirts and leads him on and he falls for her hook, line, and sinker. Mike begins stalking Susan and her fiancé, even following them to clubs and porno theaters around London. The film builds to a crescendo when Mike helps Susan find the diamond for her wedding ring after it fell off. As they empty and melt bags of snow and dirt from the area where the diamond was lost into the bath's central swimming pool, Mike strips naked and assaults her. I won't give away what happens afterwards, but suffice it to say that the bath patrons will have one hell of a spectacle when they arrive in the morning. I hesitate to promote Deep End because the director's intentions seem ambiguous. Mike's destructive habits are not shown in a negative light. In fact, his agonies are portrayed with an almost poetic sense of consolation. Are we supposed to feel bad for him? Are we supposed to feel that he was cheated out of a relationship with Susan? I'm honestly not sure.

7/10