Educational Media Reviews Online

Not one person appears in this compelling and provocative film; all of it is told in voiceover. The documentary director Jane Gillooly found photographs, letters and sixty hours of audio tapes in a suitcase she bought on eBay. Selections of the contents provide a dual audio diary of a passionately steamy, adulterous love affair that took place in the Midwest in the 1960s. The voices of Tom, a married man, and Jeannie, his paramour, alternate, and although both voices are clear and articulate, subtitles are provided. For the most part, Tom and Jeanne are not together when we’re listening in; they’re recording love letters to each other. One exception is an X-rated “graphic” sex scene. We never see what the couple looks like—there’s a photo of Tom, or a man, with his head cut off; we don’t see Jeanne at all. Throughout the film, we hear music and see television references to Miss America 1965 and NASA’s Gemini mission, still images of tape recorders and labeled tapes as well as typewriters, matches, roads at night, trees, and dog cages—Tom is a veterinarian.

We hear of the couple’s meeting at a hotel in St. Louis. They go to a planetarium together in Chicago. They talk explicitly about sex. At one point, Tom explains in great detail how he’s making a sex toy for Jeanne out of Plaster of Paris, and we later hear her pleasuring herself with it. Jeanne's growing despondence pushes Tom towards divorce. Tom reveals that his wife Lucille has known of the affair and has been listening to the tapes. She knew of the St. Louis tryst. Tom claims that Lucille would never give him a divorce, but we suspect that he’s never asked for one. He tells Jeanne a divorce would have an adverse affect on him professionally. He tells her he’s read Ann Landers on “triangular situations,” but hasn’t read of one “as bad as ours.” He breaks up with Jeanne in the final recording, and we’re spared her response.

At one point, Tom tells Jeanne that “There’s nothing like a tape, is there, darling”? There’s nothing quite like “watching” a film of disembodied voices, voices that are actively having in real (if not reel) time quite an in of body experience.