Playgirl's Progress

Darling is a bitter, glittering and sometimes stabbingly brilliant tale of a jet-set jade and how she grew. In quasi-documentary style, British Director John Schlesinger (Billy Liar) begins with a standard narrative device: a celebrated beauty spilling "My Story" to a magazine called Ideal Woman. Her name is Diana (Julie Christie), a sometime model, sometime bit actress, anytime trollop, whose face is her passport to the haut rnonde, where a legion of intimates come to know her as "Darling."

Well brought up, disastrously beautiful, Darling grows bored with marriage to a "desperately immature" nobody, latches onto a bookish TV commentator (Dirk Bogarde) who deserts his wife and family to go live with her. He also introduces her to Important People. "Here was one of the great writers of the century, and there I was . . . suddenly, one felt madly in," she confides to the sound-track interviewer, revealing less in words than in her subtly interchangeable accents, which range from grande-dame to guttersnipe.

Eventually, she trades in her commentator for a late-model cad (Laurence Harvey) from the advertising world, wins modest renown as "the Happiness Girl," promoting "chocolates with fairy-tale centers." Her own fairy tale ends, many escapades later, when she finds ruin at the top as the wife of a wealthy Italian nobleman. Mistress of a sprawling palazzo, she endures boredom, fame, and neglect--despising the suffocating luxury of a milieu that has nurtured and, at last, enslaved her.

Making capital of Frederic Raphael's brittle screenplay, Director Schlesinger never lets his unsavory subject lapse into cheapness and sensationalism. His weapon is satire, spelled out in a caustic picture essay on London society's fags, hypocrites and well-heeled fashion setters, who can lionize a pop artist with no claim to distinction except a five-year stretch in jail. And by shrugging off sex, dryly noting its acceptance as a sort of public utility, Darling succeeds where other entries in the movie sleepstakes fumble. The sharpest asides occur in Capri, where the future principessa and her homosexual photographer-pal compete in a game of one-upmanship involving a dark-eyed waiter.

As the amoral heroine, Julie Christie offers her polished surface to the camera in a chic, showy performance that floods nothingness with light. When she entertains a bid from Harvey, walking barefoot atop a boardroom conference table in tantalizing finery, Christie evokes an image of corruption that might well tempt a gentleman to corporate risks. She is the apotheosis of trumped-up celebrity, an authentic contemporary creature whose every misstep makes thousands leer. Because her passions are only skin-deep, her tragedy is trivial. But at every toss of her blonde mane, every shard of a smile, all else on the screen becomes mere backdrop. Her stunning presence--and Schlesinger's stylish tracking of a playgirl's progress --makes Darling irresistible.

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