Watched: Darling
It’s interesting to see that this film has been skewered in more recent years; on the one hand, there certainly is some reductionism going on in the way it satirises the upper classes, but on the other it stays just as biting when it comes to its savagery. Julie Christie is by turns beguiling and repellent, and turns in a stellar performance as Diana Scott - in any other actress’s hands, you’d go through the film hating the series of terrible, selfish decisions she makes.
It’s a film about coming to a grand old establishment as a newcomer, and accepting it blindly, right down to marrying into royalty for the sake of attention and giggling derisively about homosexuals and black people. It’s perhaps ironic that two of the people who see through the protagonist’s bullshit-smeared veneer are a black character (grotesquely posing as Diana Scott herself) and a gay man (who, surprisingly, isn’t nearly as caricatured as a film made in 1965 might have been).
The proxy for the viewer is arguably Robert, a TV journalist who has an affair with Scott, only to spurn her when she returns from one of a number of romantic excursions with other men. The most emotionally tense moments of the film occur when he and Christie are on-screen, and it makes the final seven or eight minutes gripping to watch; to finally see Scott bouncing against Robert’s stoic wall of a character with no resolution is cathartic and tragic in equal measure.
Certainly worth watching, though like a lot of British films made in the sixties, there’s a languorous pace that takes some getting used to. Make sure you have a drink and a comfortable chair handy.
