OUT OF SEASON

UK, 1975, 90 minutes, Colour.
Vanessa Redgrave, Cliff Robertson, Susan George.
Directed by Alan Bridges.

Out of Season: do you like those claustrophobic dramas of intense and complicated personal relationships that focus on a few characters in a symbolic setting? Then this film is a must. The out-of-season setting is an empty wintry hotel managed by Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter, Susan George. Their frustrated lives and love-hate relationship are disturbed by a returning stranger, Cliff Robertson. The acting is excellent with Vanessa Redgrave at her best. The setting and mood are depressingly effective (directed by Alan Bridges who made The Hireling and Brief Encounter) with a symbolic use of music. However the ending is unnecessarily and tantalisingly ambiguous.

1. The meaning of the title? Literal, symbolic? Winter, the season of age? Isolation and the tourist resort out of season? How did the various meanings intertwine?

2. The visual atmosphere of the credits? The music and the influence of the music throughout the film? The use of the dance themes?

3. The atmosphere of colour, seaside location, atmosphere of the house and the sea, of winter? As background for the themes?

4. The picture of the hotel? The look of it, light and darkness? The rooms? The boarder and his place in the film? The postman?

5. How well did the film communicate the atmosphere of an enclosed world? Enclosed by the past and present? By the future? The physical isolation? Yet the touches of a wider world, e.g. the postman, the boarder, fishing, the train, the road out of town?

6. The old theme of the stranger who enters and changes people's lives? Audience expectations of this theme? How well handled? The variations on this theme?

7. The exploration of loving relationships? Of hate? The combinations of love and hatred between the three characters? The playing of games, verbal fencing? The telling of the truth? Which of the characters was more prone to tell the truth? To play games? Why?

8. The theme of power and people holding power over another? The nature of ambitions, of young and old? Joe's hold over Anne's love? Anne's holding of the hotel over Joe? Joanna holding the present over both Joe and Anne?

9. How were we made to enter Anne's world? What was the nature of her world, her work, her memories, her relationship to Joanna? Joe as bringing back the past? The truth about what had happened to her? Whose fault that the love had broken down? The new happiness? Her readiness to accept him? The effect of healing memory? The rivalry with Joanna? Her coping with this? Telling Joe of the truth?

10. What kind of person was Joe? The seediness of his first appearance, his return and our entering the town with him? The nature of his hold on Anne? The visual presentation of this e.g. the drinking, the reminiscences, the dancing? Joanna on the outside? The lure of Joanna for Joe? Her flaunting her sexuality? Anne's catching Joe with her? Joe as ageing, seeking young companionship and the memories of his past?

11. The contrast of Joanna? Her resentment about her parentage and the orphanage? Her love for her mother, her hate? Her selfishness? Her work and life at the hotel? Enjoying the rivalry with her mother? Testing her sexuality? The truth and taunting games with Joe? Being caught with Joe?

12. How teasing was the ending? Who went and why? The trickiness of this device? Its meaning? (The similar ambiguity of the woman waiting in Joe's room in the dark).

13. How interesting an exploration of human nature? People's lives? Love and hate? Happiness and despair?