Return of the Secaucus Seven

A motley group of '60s survivors reunite ten years on in a New Hampshire cottage to mull over the implications of reaching thirty - shuffling counter-culture nostalgia and fragmenting future perspectives between themselves during a weekend of low-key stocktaking, love-making and laughter. Sayles' fascinating debut as a writer/director, produced independently on the modest earnings from his witty genre screenplays for Roger Corman, returns him to the naturalistically observed world and characters of his fiction. Intelligently applying the virtues of necessity, Sayles concentrates on dialogue and editing to construct a spider's web of intricate personal politics and emotions, and a warm, unmannered comedy of character and connections. No amens, no emblems, and no excess; just a variant on Alain Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 which laughs with its 'greened' Americans rather than at them.