Or rather, the film itself is the game, since screenwriter Peter Everett, adapting his own novel, and director Peter Medak, directing his first feature, keep the rules securely buried and only they, presumably, can distinguish the shifting levels of fantasy and reality that in the film are stylistically and thematically inseparable: a casual lack of discrimination that finally kills all interest in the proceedings, real or unreal.

The disorder in the air, the brittle tension between the two, is underlined by the messy roving of the camera: Vivien's sharp, bitchy remarks followed by long, hasty pans to Theo, standing or sitting, inert and morose.

The same fussy technique, a fidgety choice of the odd camera angle or a sudden, swirling movement, only labours not so much the oddity, the tragic fantasy of this hermetic ménage a trois, as the perversity, the dramatic capriciousness that conveniently produces Reingard to provide Theo with a new part once the old one is hanging in tatters.

By the film's end, with Theo sitting bolt upright in the plane, blood trickling from one corner of his mouth, it is reasonable to ask, but more difficult to care, whether this is intended to suggest actual suicide or merely the furthest extension of his fantasy, on a level with the tinted footage of dogfighting aircraft; or whether, having reached the extreme of his solitary male fantasy, Theo has symbolically 'died'.

[4]In The New York Times, Vincent Canby found the film "so good in so many of its particulars that it is hard to believe that it finally goes so wrong with such a straight face ...