He hopes to enlarge on the work of Malinowski with a multi-year field study of a Trobriand Island community, whose matrilineal culture encourages pre-marital sex.

He needs his star student Evelyn, who has a gift for languages, to accompany him and asks her to marry him — despite his gauche approach she acquiesces.

MacGregor (John Howard), who is urging them to abandon their funeral rituals for burial in the Christian cemetery, and wants the women to cover their breasts.

She becomes proficient at the language, and in conversation with the women learns of their conception myth: because recreational sex is a way of life they do not see pregnancy as an occasional outcome.

She has an argument with her husband; he deprecates her ambitions as a researcher on the grounds of his academic credentials and her inferior status as a female student.

She buries him native fashion; she removes her clothing and goes through the widow's ritual: her head is shaved, she is blackened all over with mud and shuts herself in a cage, preparing to starve herself to death.

The film ends with a flashback to the idyllic moment when he told her of the legend that a gold-lipped oyster predicted a lasting relationship.

"[6] Bennett decided to shoot the film on location on the Trobriands, using hundreds of locals as extras, which lent it near-documentary authenticity but at great expense.

No thesps stand out in the middling ensemble job, the sexual politics are old hat, and even pretty pictures of the Trobriand Islands aren't memorable.