Plot
Marjorie Beaslie (Walters) is a housewife in her forties who takes in a lodger named Harold Guppey (Graves), who has just stumbled into town to look up his long-lost brother (played by Les Dennis). Although seemingly prudish (she no longer sleeps in the same bed as her husband, for "medical reasons"), Marjorie takes a liking to Harold despite him being a good twenty-years her junior. They begin to have a clandestine affair, sneaking into bed together at night. Ever since taking in her lodger, Marjorie insists that Harold refer to her as "mum", giving more than a little oedipal slant to their subsequent lustful antics.
Marjorie's youngest daughter is fourteen-year-old Joyce (Sadler), a precocious, Lolita-like girl who alternates between trying to act grown up by putting on make up and smoking cigarettes, and acting childish by grossing people out with tales of medieval punishments and giggling at rude words.
Joyce is fascinated by Harold and with her teasing behaviour she cunningly turns him from being apathetic towards her to being intrigued by her. At one point, she catches Harold in bed with her mum, but seemingly does not realise what they are up to and merely thinks they're having an innocent "bunk up". She talks her way into getting them to let her climb into the bed, and Harold and Marjorie continue their intimate relations whilst Joyce is asleep, or rather, pretending to be and steadily realising what is actually going on. A few days later, Joyce blackmails Harold into taking her to a hotel for the night, where he turns the tables on her and all but seduces her before spurning her.
Marjorie's husband, Stanley, is a one-legged World War I veteran, older than his wife, who sleeps in a separate room from his wife and is as oblivious to all the sordid antics of his wife and daughter initially as the rest of the suburban neighbourhood is.
Sick of being caught between a mother and daughter, who are too old and too young for him respectively, Harold tries to get out of the house and move away, joining the army and getting a new more suitable girlfriend but Marjorie manages to emotionally blackmail him into coming back.
One day, Harold takes Marjorie and Joyce out for a picnic, although things are tense between the trio. Having sent her daughter Joyce away to play, Marjorie begins to ravish Harold, but Joyce returns and hits her mother with an axe. Harold panics and attempts to get Marjorie into the car to take her to hospital but, with blood streaming down her face, Marjorie manages to pick up a knife Harold drops and attacks him with it. Harold fights Marjorie off and stabs her to death. Joyce then tries to attack Harold and so he stabs her to death too. Finally, Harold stabs himself in the stomach in an attempt to emphasise that is actions were out of self-defence. The post-script to the movie says that he was sentenced to death for Joyce's murder, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and that a charge of murdering Marjorie was dropped due to lack of evidence.
Read more about this topic: Intimate Relations (1996 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)