MURDER and Murder

Doris, 63 and a grandmother, has recently fallen in love for the first time with a woman, Mildred, a life-long lesbian and well-to-do professor. Rainer's film examines the women's relationship in characteristically wide-ranging and often playful terms: it's about identity, memory, communication breakdown, role-playing, power-struggles, stereotypes, and performance. It's also not nearly as funny as it would like to be - much of the 'slapstick' is painfully tedious - and some of the vaguely experimental formal conceits seem a little pointless or dated.