Robert Altman / 1969 / US / 113min

Available on Blu-Ray and DVD

This 1969 Robert Altman picture comes as a shock. It couldn’t be more different to his tragicomic MASH of a couple of years later nor more different to his great ensemble movies like Nashville, The Player or Gosford Park. Essentially this is a chamber piece, or more accurately a duet.

The wonderful Sandy Dennis (best remembered for playing the nervy young wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for which she won an Oscar) plays Frances, a lonely dusty muffin in her early 30s living in her late mother’s apartment in chilly Vancouver. It’s a desiccated life surrounded by mama’s creaky belongings and equally creaky elderly friends. Then she spots a young homeless man sitting in the park in the rain.

What transpires is an exploration of mood, a psychological study of loneliness, disconnection and repression – and their opposites. Dennis is a superb actress (Altman’s women are always more interesting than his men) and, as ever, hugely watchable. Michael Burns, as ‘the Boy’ (he’s in his late teens), has an innocent, baby-faced quality. It’s easy to see why Frances is obsessed with him. There are scenes when she becomes a sort of Mary figure, washing the feet of Jesus. It’s not long before one of them starts getting their freak on. The audience is left to guess who is zooming who.

Three quarters of the way through the story makes a predatory change of gear and things become darker and more overtly sexual. But this is no icy, taut thriller but something much more measured – don’t expect too many shocks along the way. The story would be very different if it was an older man giving succour to a teenage girl.

Rainy Vancouver, the fussy apartment with its perilously-balanced vases and table lamps – a reflection of Frances’s own perilous state of mind – add to the gloomy, tentative mood. It’s all gloriously photographed by master cinematographer László Kovács. The colour scheme with its murky old-lady hues contrasts with Frances’s garish nightwear. It’s enough to unsettle anyone.

But why was this Altman movie chosen for Blu-ray? Come Back to the Five and Dying, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), which also stars Sandy Dennis, is crying out for a rerelease.