Separation is a 1967 British experimental psychological drama film directed by Jack Bond and starring Jane Arden, David de Keyser, Ann Lynn and Iain Quarrier.

But his concoction of interior imagery, bleached out dream sequences and crude symbolism (a clock face smashed at regular intervals, a pistol in a shooting gallery) is as shapeless and incoherent as Jane Arden's suffocatingly self-conscious dialogue ("those crystal eye-balls, those stunning, indifferent fingers", and so on).

Several films have indicated that the stream of consciousness technique is not an exclusively literary property, but there is all the difference in the world between the calculated mystification of a Robbe-Grillet and a series of ostentatious images stuck together without shape or form.

An occasional scene is strikingly shot, particularly the fantasy in the swimming bath (though this is straight out of Alphaville); but too often the film's attempts at innovation produce only a chaotic array of fancy angles, monochrome tints and tired pastiche.

...To the ordinary, uninformed cinemagoer in search of entertainment the only aspect of this film that is likely to be understood is that it is an attempt to express the emotional ramblings of a lonely woman.

It jumps from one facet of the main character to another without reference to time or commonsense; interpolates lifelike but boring conversations about nothing in particular; and even includes one extraneous scene that is pointlessly vulgar.

One of its more irritating features is the habit of repeating the dialog at irregular intervals throughout the film; that would have been bad enough in any circumstances, but when the script is dull and witless in the first place, repetition only adds to the boredom.

It's almost as if Jack Bond, the director, and Jane Arden, who wrote the story and stars in the film, were afraid that without these instructions the uninformed moviegoer would mistake their surreal fantasy about every woman for something that looks suspiciously like a soap opera about – of all things – menopause.

[6] Phelim O'Neill wrote in The Guardian: "Separation appears to be a subconscious trawl thorough a marital and possibly mental breakdown – a dourly groovy one, set in swinging London.