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Winter of Our Dreams (1981)

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clip 'Nocturnal guests'

Original classification rating: M. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Lou (Judy Davis) catches the last ferry to Balmain, after phoning Rob (Bryan Brown). He meets her on the wharf and takes her home. She tries to embrace him, not knowing that his wife is in the next room. After meeting Gretel (Cathy Downes), Lou feels embarrassed and confused. Rob tries to put her at ease. He tells her she can stay the night.

Curator’s notes

by Paul Byrnes

This is Lou’s first inkling that Rob lives a different lifestyle to any she has seen – an 'open relationship’ with 'nocturnal guests’ allowed. The arrival by ferry is partly symbolic – to accentuate the sense of a different world. Lou lives in a world where sex is bought and sold; she’s shocked to meet people who place no boundaries around it, even when married, but the conflict in this scene is around class, rather than simply sexual mores.

Davis’s performance gives a lot of subtle signs of her character’s working class origins – both in the way she talks and the way she thinks. Rob’s house, the décor and his clothing, show that he’s from a new class, one she is not comfortable with – the inner-city, educated intelligentsia. In contrast to clip one, in which she was able to exercise a degree of control in her own milieu, she feels completely at sea in his house. She thought that she was getting away from her sordid life, but her escape has been blocked by his unknown reality. The key question throughout the movie is where can she go? Where is there a place for her?

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