Secrets

Chatty piece from UK's Satori Films begins with housewife Jacqueline Bisset taking her young daughter to the laundry to do a load of clothes (hardly the type of scene to start off what was advertised as an erotic drama!). After sitting for awhile, Bisset goes out for a walk and is picked up in the park by a widower-businessman who thinks she looks like his late wife. Meanwhile, the daughter leaves the laundromat with a grown man who shows her his garden (and kisses her), and Bisset's husband takes an aptitude test for a computer programming job and strikes up a relationship with the moderator. Screenwriter Rosemary Davies, working from a treatment by the film's director, Philip Saville, is interested mainly in probing the questioning minds of her characters; however, her dialogue is so vacant and vague that, by the finale, nothing significant has been gained by the experiences of the day--and nothing is learned. The underwhelming "Secrets" finally made it to the US in 1978 via low-rent Lone Star Films, who managed to get on Bisset's bad side by marketing the picture as an R-rated heavy-breather. The actress's nudity is fairly brief--and the love scene nonexploitative--which surely caused some dissension among moviegoers. * from ****