Susan’s incessant teasing of Mike eventually lead to his winning the upper hand, but realizing his dream is not enough.
the fantasy plane of their relationship and Mike’s determination to transcend it, Mike sits behind Susan in the theater and—galvanized by the heady proponderance of nudity onscreen—reaches around to caress her breast. She slaps him and sends Chris to complain to the manager, but then rewards Mike for his bravery with a kiss while he’s away. Moulder-Brown’s reaction to this gift is price- less, and one can see Asher giggling behind her hands in response to it, though this slip might ar- guably be Susan’s response as well. It’s important to remember that Susan does find Mike attractive (she calls him “handsome” and smiles covetously as she glimpses him naked when he redresses in dry clothes after a tumble into the pool—we grab at such evidence as Mike himself might), and her tacit encouragement takes him, and us, to the film’s pinnacle: the Saturday night sequence set in Soho.
The lengthy Soho sequence—with its astound- ing, free-floating, handheld photography, Can’s epic song “Mother Sky” weaving in and out of the sinuous action, and its accumulation of won- derful incidental characters (including Burt Kwouk as an impish hot dog vendor)—is the great set piece of Skolimowski’s career, both
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dizzying and exhilarating as Susan’s every uncon- scious step goads Mike to cross more and more lines forbidden to him by age and law. Again ac- companied by Chris, Susan first leads Mike to an exclusive discotheque (“Skoli”) he’s neither old nor rich enough to enter; then, in a fit of covetous- ness and outrage, he steals from the entrance to a strip club a lifesize advert of an exotic dancer resembling Susan (ironically named Angelica); then he must flee the club’s bouncers and the police into the boudoir of a disabled-but-still-working prostitute (Louise Martini, whose leg cast bears the signature of Mike’s soccer hero), before finally joining Susan on the underground tube and con- fronting her with the cardboard evidence of a dirtyness he doesn’t want to believe, and which she doesn’t give him the satisfaction of denying. DEEP END is presented “in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio,” though earlier broadcast sources prove it was in fact shot by Charly Steinberger in an open-aperture 1.33:1 format. The 1080p/24 fps BR presentation (playable on US BR players) and the anamorphic presentation on the second, stan- dard DVD9 PAL disc (unplayable on US players) are nevertheless handsomely composed through- out, though I personally miss seeing the full
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