John and Mary

A film set in New York. Two people meet in a bar. They spend the night together. They wake in the morning. Neither knows the other's name. From there the film lasts one day. The same flat, the same two people, a breakfast and a day. They talk. But what they say and what they think are not the same. The narrative gives this directly. We hear both their inner voices, and the distance between speech and thought is the film's whole method. Flashbacks come. John's old relationship, Mary's time with a married man. Both are hurt. Neither wants to show it. Through the day they test each other. A question is asked, an answer given, and the inner voice says the answer is a lie. What the narrative is interested in is not love but caution: its idea is that as relationships loosened at the end of the sixties people began to trust each other less, and that even asking a name counts as a commitment. The flat is a character. John's place is orderly, expensive, and holds few personal things. Mary reads it. She looks around and builds a picture of the man, and she is mostly wrong. There is a telephone. It rings and is not answered; the narrative uses this again and again. The ending is small. The narrative makes no large decision and finishes with the two of them saying their names. Dustin Hoffman made this between The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy. Dustin Hoffman, Mia Farrow, Michael Tolan and Sunny Griffin are in the cast. Peter Yates directed; he had made Bullitt the year before and the work here is built on the opposite principle. Who it is for: anyone who likes late 1960s American cinema and two-hander room films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting incident; the narrative is almost entirely talk and the inner-voice technique becomes repetitive.