[1] The film is a cinema vérité portrait of Billy and Antoinette Edwards, a married couple living in Toronto, Ontario.
[1] Sensing trouble in his friend's marriage and wanting to make a film about marital conflict, King convinced the Edwards to allow their home life to be filmed for ten weeks by cinematographer Richard Leiterman and sound technician Chris Wangler; however, to ensure that his presence did not accidentally distract Billy and Antoinette Edwards from behaving naturally, King himself did not enter their house at all and "directed" the film only when editing the footage after each day's shooting.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that "What King ultimately proves, I think, is that something that is neither fact nor fiction is less meta-truth than sophisticated sideshow.
Better than any other instrument, perhaps, the documentary camera can capture the sense and feeling of events, of social climates, and even of people in public crisis, but meaningful private drama must always elude it since the camera is stopped by what Arthur Miller once called 'the wall of the skin'.
"[2] Time wrote that the film "in its utter nakedness, makes John Cassavetes’s Faces look like early Doris Day.