Perhaps it was because this film was steeped waist deep into the 1960's, I found it trite. It starts off with a documentary film maker and his wife going off to some new-age psychological treatment camp. Throughout the film you'll also be exposed to psychoanalysis (the prevalent psychotherapeutic modality at the time and beginning to gain traction among the middle classes), an argument over some sort of birth control, home-exercise regimens, and talk about the acceptability of hair that goes past one's ears in men. This movie is a time capsule. If you tried to make a movie parodying the 60s you'd find it hard to get more 60s.
And the whole movie revolves around the concept of general hippyism, specifically free love, but non-violence is also mentioned at some point. All we need now is some scenes of the Vietnam war.
Or perhaps it's not the dated quality of the setting, concerns, and situations of the characters so much as the fact that the characters are boring and most of their story arcs don't amount to anything. One guy's a bit shy, one woman's a bit rigid, the main male protagonist is a bit hippie. They're all bland and rather lifeless.
Now, I can't say the movie offers nothing. It offers an alternative perspective to the rigid sexuality of the 50s and how new-age ideas on sexuality can (or perhaps were beginning to?) seep into the prudish middle classes. There's also an exploration of the meaning of love, but it doesn't really feel sincere. Everyone just accepts things sooner or later. Perhaps that was the point - it was much more unnatural to put up the rigid structures in the first place than to break them down.
As for the treatment of sexuality itself, it now seems distant, dated, even jejune. Now the positioning of the very predictable climax of the film seems laughable. Too little, too late. These days it would come in the middle or the beginning or outright just be mentioned offhand as something normal in a film, whereas here it seems to have been the impressive finishing blow in 1969.
Honourable Mentions: Office Space (1999). In this movie the main female protagonist has her outlook on life changed by an odd psychotherapeutic retreat her. It's the same basic situation in Office Space, where the high-strung neurotic engineer changes his outlook on life and in turn experiences a very significant improvement in quality of life.
And the whole movie revolves around the concept of general hippyism, specifically free love, but non-violence is also mentioned at some point. All we need now is some scenes of the Vietnam war.
Or perhaps it's not the dated quality of the setting, concerns, and situations of the characters so much as the fact that the characters are boring and most of their story arcs don't amount to anything. One guy's a bit shy, one woman's a bit rigid, the main male protagonist is a bit hippie. They're all bland and rather lifeless.
Now, I can't say the movie offers nothing. It offers an alternative perspective to the rigid sexuality of the 50s and how new-age ideas on sexuality can (or perhaps were beginning to?) seep into the prudish middle classes. There's also an exploration of the meaning of love, but it doesn't really feel sincere. Everyone just accepts things sooner or later. Perhaps that was the point - it was much more unnatural to put up the rigid structures in the first place than to break them down.
As for the treatment of sexuality itself, it now seems distant, dated, even jejune. Now the positioning of the very predictable climax of the film seems laughable. Too little, too late. These days it would come in the middle or the beginning or outright just be mentioned offhand as something normal in a film, whereas here it seems to have been the impressive finishing blow in 1969.
Honourable Mentions: Office Space (1999). In this movie the main female protagonist has her outlook on life changed by an odd psychotherapeutic retreat her. It's the same basic situation in Office Space, where the high-strung neurotic engineer changes his outlook on life and in turn experiences a very significant improvement in quality of life.