.... because, for one, the sixties is just not my decade for film. Generally, films of that era feel free of the production code for the first time in 30 years and make sex the point of the film, and they just seem archaic today. The intended "shock value" sometimes gets in the way of what would have been a good film with the distraction removed. Also, I was told by some people that this film was slow and boring. Instead, I found it intriguing.
There is quite a bit going on at several levels. David Hemmings as Thomas, a fashion photographer, goes to great lengths to get gritty photographs for a book he is making. He even spends the night in a homeless encampment. He is always looking for interesting subjects, but at the very beginning of the film, he passes by a carload of mimes in various costumes, somebody who appears to be a member of the Queen's guard just walking down the street, and a group of men in native African dress. He doesn't notice them. He treats his models like objects. They bore him. When two girls enter his office and want him to photograph them he shoos them away. Then when he tries to buy something in a shop, the shopkeeper shoos him away. He doesn't get the connection. To anything. Unless it is in a photograph. And it is in some photographs of a couple having some kind of secretive romantic moment in a secluded tree surrounded glen of a public park that he finds something that jars him. But he has to see it in a "blow up" of the photographs he took to realize there is something else there that he never noticed. And you are an hour into the film before this happens.
He goes to confirm what he thought. It is true. He tries to get somebody to help him. They ignore him. Ultimately he seems to be like John Sims in the 1928 film The Crowd. The next morning, stripped of any evidence to the contrary, he just gives in to the false narrative signified by him throwing an imaginary tennis ball to some mimes who are faking a tennis game.
In an American film he would have been shadowed by the perpetrators, taken captive and brought to their lair, told the significance of what he saw, and just before he is killed by them, the police would break in, save him, and capture the bad guys. This is not an American film.
There is quite a bit going on at several levels. David Hemmings as Thomas, a fashion photographer, goes to great lengths to get gritty photographs for a book he is making. He even spends the night in a homeless encampment. He is always looking for interesting subjects, but at the very beginning of the film, he passes by a carload of mimes in various costumes, somebody who appears to be a member of the Queen's guard just walking down the street, and a group of men in native African dress. He doesn't notice them. He treats his models like objects. They bore him. When two girls enter his office and want him to photograph them he shoos them away. Then when he tries to buy something in a shop, the shopkeeper shoos him away. He doesn't get the connection. To anything. Unless it is in a photograph. And it is in some photographs of a couple having some kind of secretive romantic moment in a secluded tree surrounded glen of a public park that he finds something that jars him. But he has to see it in a "blow up" of the photographs he took to realize there is something else there that he never noticed. And you are an hour into the film before this happens.
He goes to confirm what he thought. It is true. He tries to get somebody to help him. They ignore him. Ultimately he seems to be like John Sims in the 1928 film The Crowd. The next morning, stripped of any evidence to the contrary, he just gives in to the false narrative signified by him throwing an imaginary tennis ball to some mimes who are faking a tennis game.
In an American film he would have been shadowed by the perpetrators, taken captive and brought to their lair, told the significance of what he saw, and just before he is killed by them, the police would break in, save him, and capture the bad guys. This is not an American film.