Follow Me!

Charles, a London accountant, wonders how his wife Belinda spends her days and hires a private detective. Julian is an odd man: he eats yoghurt constantly, does not speak, and while following her strikes up a silent friendship with her. For weeks they walk the city together without a word passing between them. The film is not interested in the suspicion of an affair. It is interested in the muteness of a marriage: Charles has had a stranger ask the question he could not ask his wife, and what the detective brings back is not a crime but a description of loneliness. The form is soft and wandering: London in the seventies, museums, parks, the riverside. John Barry's score is what actually stays with you. Carol Reed directed, and it is his last completed film. The source is Peter Shaffer's own play The Public Eye, and he wrote the screenplay too. On release it drew neither critical nor commercial interest and remained for a long time a footnote in the careers of everyone involved. Mia Farrow plays Belinda, Topol the detective and Michael Jayston the husband. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies British chamber comedy and John Barry scores. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for events. The film is almost entirely talking and walking, its stage origin is plain and the final section resolves too neatly.