New Print Many critics consider Deep End to be the best film of the Polish director Skolimowski, who by 1970 was working in London. Like Targets, Deep End works the dark obsessions of a stolen youth with black humor; but here the arena is sexual, the "deep end" seemingly bottomless. The film is set in a London public baths whose green tiles, though antiseptically scrubbed, tell of another kind of slime: a desperate sexuality seems to float along the steam from cubicle to cubicle making privacy a public matter. Jane Asher plays a bath attendant whose sacrificed youth is readily apparent: Susan is corrupted on the one hand by propriety (she mercilessly manipulates her beau toward marriage with all the trimmings), and on the other hand by trysts not written into her job description. Into this environment comes a virginal 15-year-old attendant, Michael (John Moulder-Brown), who is bewildered by the unspoken expectations of his own job and drawn to Susan as a youthful compatriot. His love turns obsessive while she, in turn, is both attracted and repelled by his sexual purity. Their cat-and-mouse games play like twisted vaudeville until, for both, the perversion of desire leads to grim tragedy. Andrew Sarris called Deep End, "nothing less than a work of genius on the two tracks of cinema, the visual and the psychological...(We are) in the presence of a desire so fierce and so obsessive that no pat sociological or sexological formulas can be applied..."