Australian
Screen

Australian cinema has never been more preoccupied with sexuality and gender politics than in the early to mid-1970s, but The Trespassers is one of the few films in which a male director tries to figure out what women want. The preoccupation with fidelity was a constant theme in these years, partly because it always is, and partly because of what was then called the sexual revolution. The Trespassers connects a question of freedom within relationships to the question of radical relationships in general – but largely as a way of exposing Richard’s hypocrisy. He’s very happy to initiate an affair with a beautiful and sexually open young actress – but quite unprepared for his wife to do the same – especially with another woman.

The Trespassers isn’t really a comedy, but Richard’s confusion when he is no longer the centre of his wife’s universe is very amusing. The film’s best scenes are between the two women, alone in the farmhouse, probing each other’s attitudes to love and fidelity. Their encounters with the men they meet reinforce the growing bond between them. They’re united by dissatisfaction, to some extent, but unsure of how to achieve more stable and sustaining relationships with men. There’s a sense that these two women have left behind the world of their mothers – the constraints but also the comforts. At the point that we leave them, their way forward is far from clear. It’s an unusually open – but not necessarily bleak – conclusion.