Interlude

A remake of Sirk's 1958 film about a young girl who falls in love with a married musician seemed a bizarre choice for Billington's first film. Updated to contemporary London and featuring an Evening Standard journalist as the heroine, it is an often successful attempt to relate the clichéd story to people working and living against a precisely drawn (albeit trendy) background. Billington mercifully avoids the excesses of 'Swinging London', and his observant delineation of the discrepancy between the characters' would-be sophistication and their actual stock responses is, on the whole, well supported by the performances.