[In the following review, Salamon praises Secret Friends as a beautiful "twisted joke."]

Secret Friends is the perfect movie for people who hate Valentine's Day. In this unnerving portrait of sick love Alan Bates plays a middle-aged man who can no longer distinguish between his fantasy life and the real thing—mainly because he's spent such a long time propping up reality with make-believe.

But this is no dense psychological study in any conventional sense. This is the film directing debut of Dennis Potter, whose unique, darkly comic sensibility has been developed mainly in British television shows like Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective. Mr. Potter has written novels as well, and several film scripts, including the American film version of Pennies From Heaven and Dreamchild.

Mr. Potter's work has always revealed a fascination with glossy American pop culture of the 1930s. He understands the power of that breezily sentimental music that gave people a way to express feelings that seemed impossibly romantic given the troubles the real world had to offer. He's also terribly cynical about the possibilities of non-fantasy relationships.

In this first feature, which he also wrote, Mr. Potter tells the story of a man named John whose idea of romance is a very special one. He's convinced his very young wife that they need to pretend that she was a prostitute when they met. He has become dependent on this notion, and so has she. She consents to make believe that sex between them is a financial transaction. Their "foreplay" consists of her pretending they've agreed on a price, then saying, "Whatever else you may care to give me is a personal transaction between you and me."

But she's grown tired of the game, afraid of it. She and her husband have begun to hate themselves and one another for basing their lust and affection on a nasty fiction. In fact, they'd like to kill one another—or someone. Also, he's become impossible to live with in more prosaic ways. He gets furious at her for playing music too loudly.

This may be the stuff of a psychological thriller, but Mr. Potter plays it as a twisted joke—a very stylish one at that. The movie is very pretty and bright, punctuated by images of a nightclub combo playing music that sounds very much like '30s jazz (but which was cleverly composed for the picture by Nicholas Russell-Pavier). The camera work is spirited and wonderfully composed, the work of Sue Gibson, whose first film was recently released, Hear My Song.

Mr. Potter pops in and out of John's head, filling the screen with his real life and memories as well as his fake ones, and you're never sure which is which. The story is literally a journey into John's psyche. He's traveling on a train—a very nice train, in a first-class dining car. He can't remember who he is, but starts to figure it out in flashes.

We learn that John is a painter of wildflowers and that he paints in the airy, handsome attic studio of his lovely home. He looks like what he is, the well-heeled country squire.

But the creator of these pretty, pristine drawings dreams of killing his wife, and is consumed by self-loathing. He is actually very repulsive, a man filled with bitterness, especially toward women. With his fleshy face and fake dark hair, Mr. Bates immediately gets across John's creepiness. The miracle of his performance is that he makes John bearable and frequently morbidly funny.

His fantasies are wide-ranging. They go back to his childhood as the son of a country minister with a mean spirit. He taught his son about wildflowers but as subjects of cruel quizzing. In John's dreams, his mother simply sat and watched, knitting. His refuge was his "secret friend," the inner voice that allowed him to rebel.

You start to understand why John views all physical pleasure as gross. People eating beautifully arranged food look piggish. John stares down at his dining-car lunch in shock and wonders why he's sitting there with a dead fish in front of him. When he unwraps a chocolate in a hotel room he eats it with a sickening, violent frenzy. When he touches his wife, dressed in prim, comfortable clothes, he must imagine her with long red fingernails and an electric blue dress slit all the way up her thigh.

Gina Bellman has the right looks for Helen, his wife—sexy and neurotic. She's quite believable as the confused object of John's fantasy life, but has a tendency toward overdoing it. Her eyes bulge a bit too anxiously.

As John drifts in and out of his inner ruminations, he notices that the two businessmen sitting across from him in the train's diner are watching him. When he notices them noticing him, he incorporates them into his fantasy life; they become characters in his mental flashes. These two are hilarious, obviously appalled at the rudeness of this man daring to have a nervous breakdown while they're trying to have lunch.