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Permissive
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Year: |
1970
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Director: |
Lindsay Shonteff
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Stars: |
Maggie Stride, Gay Singleton, Alan Gorrie, Robert Daubigny, Gilbert Wynne, Nicola Austin, Debbie Bowen, Stuart Cowell, Stuart Francis, Onnie McIntyre, Mick Travis, Juliet Adams, Mary Collinson, Madeleine Collinson, Susanna East, Maria Frost
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Genre: |
Drama, Trash, Music |
Rating: |
         5 (from 1 vote) |
Review: |
Suzy (Maggie Stride) has just arrived in London and is looking for a place to stay, so settles on visiting her old friend Fiona (Gay Singleton). She is the girlfriend of Lee (Alan Gorrie), who plays in a rock band which tours the length and breadth of the country, and she likes to tag along, so when Suzy shows up Fiona is keen to show her pal the sights and sounds of her man's band, which involves taking her backstage and finding her a dress to wear. The girl is soon not only mixing with groupies, but with musicians and hangers-on, though she still needs a place to stay: will this experience do her any good?
The answer to that would appear to be "no", as associating with a rock group here is judged to be on a par with selling your soul to the devil. Director Lindsay Shonteff toiled for decades in the less reputable side of British filmmaking, with this softcore effort among them, although don't go thinking this is ninety minutes of purest titillation, as there's a very stern message to be taught to you. That being, stay away from showbusiness types, girls, or they will be your ruin, as we see when the initially innocent Suzy is deflowered and inducted into a world which transforms her personality from a sweet young girl into a hardfaced woman of the world.
It must have seemed like just another exploitation flick at the time, and even then there's not much to engage as far as character and acting go, but seen now it does have the whiff of authenticity about it. The milieu it depicts is a very convincing one, about as far from glamour as it's possible to get in the music industry and must have been the lot of many bands and artistes of the day as they daily piled into the back of a transit van and hurtled up and down the nation's motorways, cunningly represented here by filming the view from a van window as it, er, travels up and down the nation's motorways. As was the case with so many, if the band here were a firm of solicitors then no girl would consider them much of a catch.
Yet as they are indulging their muses on a stage every night, then suddenly these men became irresistably attractive to a certain type of young woman; the leader of the band in this is Gorrie, now best known for the worldwide success he had with The Average White Band, and as Suzy comments the first time she claps eyes on him, he's very hairy. But she soon comes around to the allure of the more hirsute male, and before the end of the film has begun a quest to sleep with as many rock musicians (and their manager) as she can. Before that, she has a rites of passage with a painfully earnest busker, Pogo (Robert Daubigny), who she accompanies as he performs and lives rough on the streets.
A curious aspect to this is that Shonteff fancied raising this one artistic level above the likes of its contemporary, the similar Groupie Girl, which amounted to including flashforwards, as if this were actually an art movie from the Continent and not an excuse to roll out the nudity for an eager but seedy audience. This meant every so often we will have a two-second premonition of a character's death, or who they will have sex with, or whatever, presumably to keep you watching to see how what we have noticed will affect the story, such as it is. There's a distant quality to Permissive that may be to do with the cast's inexperience, but nobody in this really connects too well with anyone else, leaving an impression of them drifting aimlessly through life until something upsets their applecart. Suzy's final act of bleak coldness caps off a strangely melancholy tone. Music, and there's lots of it, all sort of folk rock, by the bands Comus and Forever More.
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Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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