Darling (1965)
(On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m not usually the kind of movie reviewer who’s harsh on whether films have aged gracefully or not. Most of the time, I tend to accept them as product of their era, and I can distinguish between good intentions at the time versus what we expect as the modern standard. I can grit my teeth at the kind of low-grade racism and sexism that was Hollywood’s baseline, and know enough about filmmaking history to tolerate technical limitations all the way back to the silent movie era. Being well-intentioned counts for a lot! But if there’s one era that I have more problem processing, it’s that weird mid-1960s to early 1980s New Hollywood period… largely because it seems so intent on upsetting the status quo that it often loses itself. I had a much harder time than expected watching the British New Wave’s late entry Darling, for instance. Focused on Julie Christie’s performance as a young woman with a chronic inability to make up her mind, it’s a romantic drama that explicitly refers to earlier film eras by having the woman’s duelling older lovers played by then-veteran Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. At the same time, it desperately wants to be of its time—specifically the Swinging Sixties sweeping Great Britain at the time, loosening morals and creating new icons for a post-post-war generation. Our characters seem as aimless as it must have felt at the time—too many possibilities, too few commitments, and an intent to upset institutions that seems irresponsible in retrospect. As a result, Darling feels curiously naïve and childish today—both on a personal level with the protagonist incapable of growing up, but also in the wider social experimentation that didn’t pan out as hoped. It’s a film that, in its desperation to feel different yet its inability to settle on a way forward, feels much longer than its 127-minute duration and much more irritating than it was intended. Not every Oscar-nominated picture ages well, but Darling seems even more dated than most—not because it’s technically limited, not because it’s particularly retrograde, but because it intently proposes ideas that just feel immature generations later.