Saw Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (thanks, Thomas!) It was a 60s sex-drama. It starts with husband and wife duo Bob & Carol going to some kind of couple's retreat where they undergo a gruelling and cult-like 24-hour group therapy session. It culminates with them having some kind of epiphany that they love each other while the therapist hugs them both, inserting his blond head between them, awkwardly separating them as the other therapist groupies dog-pile on, hugging and weeping. The result is an ugly tangle of squashy men and overly made-up women clad in the finest brown and pastel colors. This moment is confusing to me because I don't know if I'm supposed to seriously interpret this as a beautiful (if messy) outpouring of emotion or am I meant to actually be repulsed by the dog-pile, and to see this as bored suburbanites fooling themselves into meaningful moments? This encapsulates a lot of my feelings about this film.
Anyway, as for the plot: the rest of the film deals with Bob & Carol experimenting with free sex (or as they winsomely call it, free love) and their more suburban friends Ted & Alice trying to deal with it. The film is very believable and the characters are written and acted well enough that I could identify very complex emotions passing through them. (We can tell from very early on, by the way, that B & C & T & A are gonna be playing bed-hopscotch by the end of the film. I mean, this is the freakin' poster.) But this film is like an optical illusion. At one moment it seems very sophisticated and edgy and progressive and then you get just a glimpse of a maid in the background, looking on bemused as they delicately change partners during a dance. Their endless talk about love and sex suddenly seems just like so many childish games of truth or dare.
This film reeks of the rich and comfortable trying to horn in on the counter-culture spirit of the 60s. They don't exactly want to sell their belongings and feed the poor, but they'll have another helping of this easy sex and drugs if you please. At one point Ted is fantasizing about picking up a woman in an airplane. "I've never cheated on my wife" he imagines he'd say "I don't have the same attitude towards sex as your generation." Jesus Christ. There's many scenes like that which I believe are supposed to be funny but are somehow not aware that they're supposed to be funny. Maybe it's just super understated? I actually think this film is trying to walk the tight-rope and appeal to both the older folks (by letting them gaze hopefully at the idea of decoupling sex and romance) and also to the kids (by letting them laugh at these rich twits.)
I found it a frustrating film in the end. It kept pulling the rug out from under me. Goofing off when I was taking it seriously and being serious when I was ready to laugh. It was an interesting watch however and very well acted. I just wish it were more easy to read.
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