John Schlesinger's Darling is, if anything, a moralistic story. And my hunch is that his moralism has a misogynist aspect. The main character - played by an icy Julie Christie - is a girl who knows what she wants, at least in one sense. She wants to be famous, she wants to succeed, she wants to get to the top. She seduces a string of men, leaves one after another behind, and when she ends up at the top, married to an elderly Italian aristocrat, it's quite boring up there, at the top. The old story: fame&wealth do not add up to much if one has lost whatever makes life worth living. If this was all there was to the film, it could have been an insufferably self-important affair (even though, of course, a bunch of good movies have been made about this theme - Jack Clayton's Room at The Top comes to mind).
It's just that Darling is a quite good film after all. It shares the light touch of other British films of the era, the snappy dialogs, great pacing brusque cinematography. You know, everything that A Taste of Honey had going for it. Darling inhabits its spaces just fine, and those spaces are not limited to sassy parties, decadent beaches or fancy apartments (but these abound!), but Schlesinger also has his own eye for ordinary life, even within this crazy-luxurious world, so that even those places have an air of drabness. The ending scene, located at a scabby-looking airport, works just great.
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