Now out on dvd - revisit this 20th Century seminal moment

Some points to clear up and make about this film.

1. Regarding the 'gay content' issue. This is the first British mainstream film to show two men lip-kissing and bedding down as incidental. To that extent it is part of gay cinematic history.

2. The film is slow, smoldering but a heavily loaded self-reflective piece about a moment when society was genuinely becomng uncertain about what it had become. It is a critique of the permissive society of the late 20th Century.
The period it captures is one where 1968 has happened and the high point of ideological expectation for complete social revolution has passed. The begining of the 70s was marked by both a continuation into extremism with the birth of the Green movement and the complete rejection of modernism and society but also a sense of life carrying on and people becoming unsure about what they had created, what they believed in, if what they were doing was right and if so where it was going.The anxiety here belongs to the middle classes.
This film very much flags up this type of questioning and directs it at it's own time. More than that, it reads as a warning against forgetting the past, the value of timeless wisdom beyond concerns of rebelion and social emanciaption.
The film is full of incidental cameos which read through the spectrum from the utterly mundane, to moral parable, to pure character study. It captures both the mood of increasing stagnation, but also a loss of ideological orientation along side a completing of the ideological implication. What pulls through at the end of the day is that life itself goes on and must be dealt with. Nobody is immune from a failure in expectation whatever their generation or background and even liberation ceases to be more important than moving on and adapting to change or being all that it is to be human.