Marking the point where Britain's realist directors turned from the proletariat to Swinging London, Darling is determined to show you all the depravity the latter milieu entails--and then make you suffer for it. The film is stultifying in its old-bourgeois disapproval of what used to be condescendingly referred to as "the younger generation," and as it ticks off the sins of its titular protagonist, Darling only makes you hate the filmmakers for being so high and mighty. There's no real analysis of what motivates the picture's aimless and amoral heroine, and no appreciation of the complexity of her plight; there is only smug moral judgment and a curt dismissal. The film is so self-consciously "serious" that it counts out any and all pleasure as shallow and destructive, leaving a grimy austerity that is as taken with surfaces as the woman it's supposed to be indicting.

The "darling" of the title is Diana Scott (Julie Christie), a young actress/model looking to get a leg up in the world. This being a "realistic" movie, the choices she makes are bad: first she breaks up the marriage of Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde), a television writer with the connections she needs. While she's happy living with him, she's restless for better gigs, thus she sleeps with Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), the dissolute producer who introduces her to the decadent leisure class. Soon she's the centre of a major ad campaign and being flown to Italy for shoots, but wouldn't you know it, she's "empty" inside and loses Robert--the one man who, you guessed it, ever truly loved her. All that's left for her is to drift into another marriage--a move that turns out to be the biggest mistake of her life.

On the level of sheer craft, Darling doesn't cut the mustard. For one thing, the central role is miscast: Julie Christie, that most laboured and wilful of actresses, doesn't suggest moral immaturity so much as bored irritation. She tries way too hard make an impression, emoting wildly when a delicate touch is required, and as a result her character doesn't so much drift through life as lumber towards the screen. (Needless to say, she won an Oscar.) But the film has bigger problems than Christie--namely, the kitchen-sink stylings of director John Schlesinger, who is so determined to show you his non-existent street cred that he renders every scene in a hard, desolate wide-angle misery that avoids any stylistic felicities in the hopes you'll mistake this soap opera for real life. It doesn't really work, and one is trapped with a vision so dry and banal as to feel chastised for actually enjoying other movies.

But it's when they translate these aesthetics into a moral program that you wind up resenting Darling the most. With no pleasurable alternative to Diana's reign of error, the film draws a line in the sand and tallies things up: the sober high culture represented by Robert (and a great but out-of-print author he interviews) is pitted against the transient culture of youth, good times, and, presumably, moral corruption. The joyless high road has the effect of driving you to the nearest mod bar in search of cheap thrills, as their either/or ultimatum sides with the dull and masochistic. Never answered is the question of why Robert is placed in the good-guy camp, even though he broke up his family to be with the eponymous vixen; in a scorching act of hypocrisy, Schlesinger and screenwriter Frederic Raphael allow his trappings of culture and learning to somehow black out his closeness to our darling. Had the filmmakers dealt with his attraction to the dark side, they might have had a movie, but instead they revel in his classy veneer and hope that no one will notice. In the end, Darling is just as much in love with surfaces as the allegedly shallow people it presumes to expose.

MGM DVD's 1.66:1 non-anamorphic widescreen presentation of Darling is hit and miss. On the one hand, it's very good indeed in scenes of bright light--definition is quite high for such a deep-focus, high-key movie, and the transfer mostly does the trick. Alas, in brief scenes of darkness, the image gives in to muddiness and the occasional compression fragment. The mono sound, meanwhile, is mostly quite excellent, and while there's a bit of softness to the track, generally speaking, the audio rings like crystal. The only extra is Darling's trailer, which hints at a far more titillating film than the one it's advertising.-Travis Hoover