Out of Season

Directed by Alan Bridges in 1975, Out of Season is a neat little puzzle-piece with an entertaining twist to its tail. Set in an English seaside town during the bleak off-season, it rings some enigmatic changes with skill and surprise on the theme of the sexually available male suddenly insinuating himself into the closed and repressed world of two women. In this case the women are a mother and daughter, played by Vanessa Redgrave and Susan George. The mother is a widow who manages a small family hotel. Twenty years before she was almost made the wife of an American, played by Cliff Robertson, who now comes calling in the hope that widowhood may have palled on the woman and he can now take up where he left off all those years ago. He meets with the unexpected resistance of the woman's daughter, until the girl's initial hostility to her mother's resumption of an old romance is replaced by the desire to divert the romance to herself. The games to do with sexual opportunity - the man stays uncertain which woman will be waiting for him, naked, in the bedroom - are elaborated with civilised skill and our curiosity is teased up to the very end about which of the women will leave with their guest-lover. The acting is low-key, but pleasantly intelligent - Vanessa Redgrave in particular manages to suggest the years between the meeting with a lover and marriage to a husband. And Alan Bridges changes the tempo of the liaisons with the same subtlety as when he allows the man and woman, both a little drunk, to get caught up in the mood of a nostalgic old gramophone record and move from a desultry tête-à-tête into the sort of exhibition tango they probably danced in the days gone by when marriage seemed the next step but one.