Follow Me – 1972 | 95 mins | Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Carol Reed’s last film was The Public Eye, a lifeless comic soufflé lacking energy and vigour. No doubt Reed viewed the endeavour as a wise retreat to creative territory where he was more at home. He was dealing with an urbane English comedy in which his light-fingered ironies could flourish and his rapport with the setting, London, would allow him to bathe the story in atmosphere. The film functions by counter pointing the stuffy, over-starched world of Sidley (Margaret Rawlings), a rich accountant, and the more spontaneous, exploratory approach to life favoured by Belinda (Mia Farrow). They ‘meet cute’ when she is working as a waitress in a London restaurant and expresses her artless-charm by spilling food all over Charles (Michael Jayston).

Naturally, it’s love at first sight. Unhappily, the headlong courtship and marriage gradually begin to leave Belinda feeling caged up with a coldly correct, unfeeling spouse. His fine old Tudor home is contrasted with Belinda’s rootlessness, his taste for Mahler and Aldous Huxley with her enthusiasm for rock music, his buttoned-down, soulless profession with her catch-as-catch-can approach to employment. A 1960s flower child whose petals are miraculously, intact, Belinda is a dreamy innocent whose last thought is unfaithfulness.

In the movie’s only stirring of creative life – a faint one at that – Christoforou (Topol) determines the truth about Belinda’s ‘assignations’ and becomes her silent and acknowledged admirer, a wordless companion who is never far away. With a more imaginative character than the detective and a better actor to play him than Topol, this aspect of the film might have cast a spell. A variant of the clumsy but warm-hearted private eye, Christoforou stuffs his disorderly briefcase with dossiers while removing endless quantities of food – yoghurt, grapefruit, etc. Naturally the joke is not just that he is a seemingly incompetent detective but also obtrusive; dressed in a blinding white coat and a peaked cap, he shoots about town on a motor scooter. No brainless gumshoe, he is an ex-philosophy student; his intellectual capacities are displayed not only in his professional aptitudes as marriage counsellor and all-around wise man, but in his command of old eastern proverbs. In conception and execution, Christoforou is a tiresomely busy creature.

Jayston makes a drab role seem even drabber by his pedestrian, humourless rendering; he’s stuffily British as required, but he communicates none of the potential fire and romance that would presumably have attracted Belinda to begin. Farrow is her usual nasal-voiced, forlorn, bird-like self, so devoid of sensuality or vivacity that we would expect her to go on spilling food on male customers for all eternity without attracting one of them.