Cirrus@Austlit

'Lou, a prostitute, meets Rob, a bookstore owner, when he investigates the suicide of an old girlfriend from his radical activist student days. She also encounters Rob's wife, Gretel, and is shocked by their 'swinging' lifestyle in which each partner casually takes lovers.'

Source: Screen Australia.

According to a contemporary review:

Carrie (Kim Krejus) and Jeannie (Sonia Peat) have fled a corrective institution and must keep low profiles. Their experience has sharpened them to the needs of life in a harsh society, relying on wit and bravado to survive, Tom (Ian Gilmour) and Serge (Sergio Frazzetti), from a rural background, have not yet lost their innocence or acquired the toughness of the city-bred guys. The four try to make the best life they can together in their near impossible economic circumstances. On the way, they discover something special in the relationships that none of them has previously known.

The review argues that:

'What Duigan's film does is to convert these generalisations into realities.

'It gives us much more positive picture of what it is like to have to shoplift to fill your belly and avoid public nudity, to live in an urban cave in an abandoned warehouse beside which shunting trains provide an incessant accompaniment, to search without success for a job, to wait at home while your girl entertains lonely men for cash at a swank hotel, to live in a world without hope and to accept it because you don't know how to complain effectively. The film is grossly political without being polemical about it, yet in spite of its innate quality of waiting for the next heartbreak, warm and strangely comforting.

Source:

'"Mouth to Mouth" Converts Generalisations into Realities', Canberra Times, 29 September 1978, p.10.

'THIS Australian film is all about the relationships of three people - a man and two women, their conflicts and their ecstasies, set against the turbulence of Melbourne's 1970 anti-Vietnam war ferment. John Derum [...] plays Richard, a radical journalist of bigamous inclinations. His women are Dee (Judy Morris), an actress who is his political alter ego, and Penny (Briony Behets), the girl with whom he is living. They are seen [...] in confrontation, after the previously unsuspecting Penny has caught Dee and Richard together. Penny and Richard drift miserably apart, but she and Dee are drawn together, despite their rivalry. While Richard is away in Sydney, they meet and become friends.

'Dee persuades Penny to join her for a brief stay at a farmhouse beside the sea. There [...] they discuss their feelings for Richard, who is nonplussed to find the girls together. They eat together uneasily in the farmhouse kitchen [...], but their relationships are unstable and events build rapidly to a crisis.'

Source:

'The Trespassers', Australian Women's Weekly, 1 September 1976, p.37. (Includes film stills.)