Sixty years ago, Life magazine declared 1965 to be ‘the Year of Julie Christie’.
In that year, she starred in the smash hit Doctor Zhivago. But, aged 25, she won her Oscar and Bafta for her other 1965 film, Darling, rereleased in cinemas and on Blu-ray for its 60th anniversary.
Christie is perfect as Diana Scott, the astonishingly beautiful, half-ingénue, half-knowing model, cutting a swathe through swinging London. Empty London, too – oh, to live in the days of Diana’s deserted Piccadilly and Heathrow Airport.
The plot of John Schlesinger’s film is simple enough. Diana betrays her young husband as she moves seamlessly from older man to older man: from arts TV presenter Robert Gold (melancholy, world-weary Dirk Bogarde) to advertising executive (smug, slick Laurence Harvey).
Diana is a sympathetic Becky Sharp, as her rake’s progress ultimately lifts her all the way up to a philandering Italian prince (José Luis de Vilallonga, a genuine Spanish marquess). And so, in a spooky vision of the future, she becomes Princess Diana, trapped in a loveless marriage.
Julie Christie is happily still with us, at 85 – though, sadly, her husband, Duncan Campbell, the writer, Guardian journalist, crime expert and Oldie contributor, has just died at 80.
Also happily still with us is the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, 93, who won an Oscar for his understated, spare screenplay for Darling.
The subtle undercurrent of his script is the grim, seamy price Diana and her lovers pay for their amoral self-indulgence.
Her gilded life starts to become wearily repetitive. She lies on the phone to her first husband to be with her first lover. She then uses her second lover to deceive her first lover with the same kind of telephone lie.
During her moral descent, Christie’s beauty remains pristine: plump lips wrapped around that ever-expanding ear-to-ear smile; deep shadows pooling under cheekbones; the glittering eyes becoming even lovelier when she’s crying, the croaky, breathless voice just breaking. But her divine features become ever more twisted by neurosis, those eyes wildly rattling from side to side.
Diana’s words and behaviour grow gradually more debauched, too, even as she retains her pleading, innocent qualities. After her abortion, a lover asks how she feels and Diana just says, flatly, agonisingly, ‘Empty.’
All the while, her modelling career goes from strength to strength; not least, in a nice, ironic touch, winning an advertising contract as ‘the Happiness Girl’, just as her sadness is deepening.
Tragic threads run through the film. Christie and her friends start bullying her goldfish, filling their tank with gin, soda water and meatballs until the poor things die.
The word ‘darling’ is dropped regularly into the script. It’s first used, charmingly and innocently, of Diana as a little girl. It’s then applied, indiscriminately, as a term of fake endearment in Diana’s waspish, camp, artistic set. And then, finally, her unfaithful Italian prince calls her darling, just as he’s rushing off to see his mistress.
Things fall apart for Diana in an undramatic and therefore convincing way. ‘Thank God, it’s never too late,’ she says when she comes back to Robert Gold – for ever, she thinks. In fact, enraged by her betrayals, he’s just having a one-night stand with her as revenge. It is too late for her to make amends.
And then there’s the final irony, as Diana’s debauchery destroys her. ‘I could do without sex,’ she says, ‘I don’t really like it that much.’
