Darling · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The first thing to distrust in Darling is the voice. Diana Scott narrates her own life as if for a glossy magazine profile: warm, fluent, faintly apologetic, the practiced candour of a woman who has already decided to forgive herself. While she talks, Schlesinger shows you something she doesn't mention. A glance held a half-second too long. A man dropped between two cuts. A face going slack with boredom in the middle of a triumph. You watch two films at once. There is the one Diana tells, and the one the camera keeps, and they never quite line up. That gap is the whole picture.

Deleuze gives us a way to see why the gap matters rather than just noticing it. In ordinary cinema, what a character says and what we see belong to a single fabric; speech rides on top of the image and confirms it. Darling breaks that contract on purpose. Its editing, as the dossier puts it, repeatedly exposes the distance between what Diana narrates and what we are shown, until the cut itself becomes the instrument of satire. Deleuze calls this an AUDIOVISUAL DISJUNCTION: the voice and the image stop telling the same story and begin telling two. The consequence is that the image goes quietly READABLE. You can no longer just watch Diana; you have to decipher her, holding the picture against the soundtrack and weighing which one is lying. This is what Deleuze means by the lectosign, the image that has lost its innocence and asks to be read.

And what it asks you to read is a forgery. Diana is not a liar in the simple sense; she is something more modern and more interesting. She is building a flattering version of herself in real time, and the film lets that version stand beside the evidence without ever arbitrating. Deleuze calls this the POWERS OF THE FALSE: not error to be corrected, but a creative principle in which truth and falsity become undecidable and the protagonist turns into a forger who manufactures her own truth. Diana forges Diana. She is caught, scene by scene, in the act of legending herself, of narrating an ascent that the images keep reorganising into something shabbier. The Oscar-winning performance works precisely because Christie plays both layers, the radiant self-account and the boredom leaking through it, and refuses to settle which is real.

Notice what she never does. She does not perceive a situation and act to change it. She drifts into a marriage, drifts out of it, drifts through Robert, through Miles, through Paris and a magazine career, and the episodes do not so much cause one another as simply succeed one another. The kitchen-sink films just behind her, the world of Reisz and Richardson and the early Schlesinger, still ran on what Deleuze calls the sensory-motor circuit: an angry young man perceives his class trap and strikes against it. Darling carries that documentary grammar upmarket and finds, at the top of the ladder, a heroine who can only drift. This is the CRISIS OF THE ACTION-IMAGE made into a portrait. Her story takes the shape Deleuze names the VOYAGE OR BALADE, the trip that transforms nothing; she moves through a procession of self-cancelling tableaux, ascending socially while descending in every other sense, and arrives exactly nowhere.

Nowhere has an address. The film ends in a cavernous Italian palazzo, Diana immured as a prince's wife amid servants and Old Masters, possessing everything and inhabiting none of it. Deleuze would read this twice. As an ANY-SPACE-WHATEVER, it is a setting that has stopped hosting action and become pure affect, all that monochrome luxury flattened into a chilly, depthless brightness that no longer leads anywhere. And as a CRYSTAL IN DECOMPOSITION, it is an aristocratic, ordered, gilded world quietly rotting from inside, with Diana sealed into the very success she chased. The staging is the moral verdict, delivered without a line of dialogue.

The craft is borrowed, and Schlesinger knew exactly whom he was robbing. The freeze-frames that arrest Diana's face come from Truffaut's last shot in The 400 Blows, the device that fixes an emotion as a held photographic still instead of resolving it. The discontinuous cutting across her affairs is Godard's licence from Breathless, time compressed by amputating the connective action between moments. The episodic march through glamour and publicity is the architecture of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, a hollow figure adrift through parties that cancel each other out. And the cool, de-dramatised observation of bored, affluent people in alienating rooms is Antonioni, the L'Avventura and La Notte register of marriages emptied from within. Schlesinger's invention is to point all of it at England, and to shoot Swinging London in austere black and white at the exact moment colour was becoming the language of glamour, withholding the lushness the subject seems to demand so that the spectacle turns clinical.

That is the significance. Darling is among the first films to treat the new affluence not as a party but as a malaise, and it did so by handing the unreliable confessional voiceover its sharpest satirical edge. It took the New Wave's freedoms, its jump cuts and freeze-frames and handheld looseness, and aimed them at the people those freedoms were supposed to liberate. Watch it again for the voice, and then ignore the voice. Watch the face instead. Schlesinger built the whole film in the half-second where the two disagree.