Darling

John Schlesinger, UK, 1965, 124 minutes

Imagine a charity event to benefit hunger in Africa where young black boys are dressed in 18th century clothes and the local pederast aristo is asking if he can take one home with him. When Diana Scott (Julie Christie) strolls across the boardroom table in evening dress, confronting brittle playboy Miles (Laurence Harvey) they ‘re discussing courtship as hostile takeover. In Paris, a little parlour game called ‘Home Movies’ forces Diana to realise most people regard her as slut, including her lover Miles. Not to be outdone, she describes Miles as an arrogant gigolo, and it’s at this moment we realise just how perfectly suited these two beautiful creatures are to one another. On holiday in Capri, Diana discovers a little cottage and voices her desire to feel complete, something that one marriage, two affairs, and a lucrative modelling career have been unable to do. Later, when Prince de la Romita proposes, her version of thinking it over is to sleep with the ambisexual waiter who’s already bedded her friend Malcolm. Even after she becomes Princess Diana—he newsreel style sequence describing this is downright disconcerting in the wake of the career arc and death of the Princess of Wales—she is more bored than ever. Like many wealthy women of leisure, she has no real duties and little function for her husband beyond acting as arm candy. In a vain attempt to return to her first lover Robert (Dirk Bogard) Diana flies to meet him and, as a kind of punishment for her past infidelities and manipulations, he sleeps with her and then sends her back to Rome, culminating in this frank exchange:

Diana: You just used me!

Robert: You used me, it’s a moot point.

Darling is a bitter critique of those who seek fame and status on the basis of their looks and charm. But, the film is equally critical of the people who prop up the celebrity industry: advertising moguls, a corrupt upper class, an equally vapid middle class (epitomized by Diana’s sister and her husband Alec), even writers and journalists with alleged integrity like Robert. This is a timely film considering our global obsession with celebrity, exposing the apparatus that creates the seamless media images we take for granted.

Review by Sarah Artt
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2004