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1975-01-01
N/A
10 min
Doubletalk is a 1975 short film directed by Alan Beattie. The film follows a young man who picks his girlfriend up at her family home and meets her parents -- and the audience is privy to their private thoughts and impressions. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
Sadly, I do remember when bell-bottoms were all the rage! I wasn’t quite as old as this lad, though, as he parks his VW beetle in the drive of his girlfriend’s swanky house and then promptly steps in something inconsiderately left on the drive! Nobody noticed so up to the door he goes and is soon being interrogated by her mother, then her father, before - eventually, “Karen” arrives. What’s special about this? Well there’s the usual cheesy chit-chat exchanged, but we also get to hear what they are really thinking too. Thinking about everything from how posh the house is, to how cute mom thinks he is, to how disappointed dad is when he hears that the lad comes from a family of dry cleaners, to the parents making acerbic comments about each other, their peccadilloes and all whilst pop is probably the only man in the history of American cinema who gives the boy about to drive his daughter out on a date a large Scotch to help break the ice. It merits a couple of watches as the formal and informal dialogues can overlap at times, but it’s worth that for the pithy and bitchy comments exchanged. Politically correct it certainly isn’t, but it seemed to me that - on balance - it was a score draw between the sexists and the chauvinists with the Woody Allen fans coming a distant third.
