Ladies of a certain age tend to favor polite and obliging young boys. So do some gentlemen.
This week's TCM Underground film was the 1971 cult item Deep End, which was co-written and directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, who had previously collaborated with Roman Polanski on the script for Knife in the Water. Just as Polanski went to England to make Repulsion and Cul-de-sac, so did Skolimowski, setting Deep End in and around a London bathhouse where a sexually inexperienced 15-year-old boy (John Moulder Brown) goes to work after leaving school. There he becomes fixated on fellow washroom attendant Jane Asher, who has a fiancé, a lover and secret past, none of which meshes well with Brown's idealized image of her. Another thing that doesn't sit well with his adolescent mentality is the idea that some of their clients require more "service" than others.
There isn't much plot to speak of, which gives Skolimowski time to fully explore the grimy bathhouse where Asher and Brown work. And while other characters float in and out of the film, the focus remains squarely on the two of them, which is most likely how Brown sees things anyway. When reality intrudes too much into his fantasy life, that's when he takes things too far, never considering what the consequences of his actions might be. So I guess the moral of the story is if you're an immature teenager, the last place you should seek work (or try to find love) is in a public bath. You'd think that would be obvious, but I guess it wasn't back then.