The film which epitomizes London's 'Swinging Sixties'

To me, the film which most epitomizes Britain’s “Swinging Sixties” is John Schlesinger’s 1965 Darling (Criterion Channel) starring Julie Christie. And Christie, in turn, most personifies the archetypical “It Girl” of the period (both on screen and off). This movie has it all as a testament to its time – mid-Sixties pop fashion, social commentary in the age of Ban the Bomb, and an oh-so-bored rising sophisticate encircled by the height of self-satisfied post-war pop culture and its subsets in the London modelling, arts and media worlds. The movie opens with a billboard of an emaciated African child being postered over by the newly glamorous model-du-jour Diana Scott (Christie). Not long after Robert (Dirk Bogarde), host of a TV arts show, accidentally meets Scott doing a “streeter” and they fall in love, jettisoning their married households. From there it’s a tour of London’s elite art and fashion sets with parties and charity balls, one in particular descending into obscene farce by the hypocrisy of the over-the-top fat cats attending it. Robert, however, is bookish. Diana is not and becomes restless. She meets Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), an advertising exec (Brand, get it?), and they begin a relationship. Miles exploits and backhandedly disparages her by starring her in a trashy B movie. Miles, a jet setter par excellence, takes her to Paris and a party filled by the avantgarde where bizarre dance rituals and cross-dressing take place. As the face of a chocolate company’s advertising campaign Scott is dubbed The Happiness Girl, ironic given her increasing descent into depression and loneliness. While on an Italian commercial shoot she meets a prince (José Luis de Vilallonga, perhaps best known for his role opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards 1961)) who proposes marriage. She rejects it and heads back to England, where she realizes the emptiness of her high-flying set and decides to seek stability. She marries Prince Cesare after all, and, like Grace Kelly who married the prince of Monaco, becomes an Italian princess and stepmother of the prince’s brood. But even the opulence in a Medici villa proves, well, unsatisfying. The princess dines all alone (her husband presumably with a mistress) in evening dress surrounded by impassive servants. In the end, modelling, glamour, elitism – it’s all a crushing bore and crashing nosedive into personal oblivion. Christie won the Oscar for best actress for the role and it’s obvious why – personifying a rebellious vacuous character who doesn’t know what she wants. And, oh yes, the louche score by John Dankworth beautifully underlines the theme.