This movie should be watched at a maximum quality possible because it is so well directed, so well filmed, so well edited that it makes watching it a wonderful visual adventure.There were times I watched with my mouth open (the part where both couples sit at the table drunk and stoned, the clapping there is pleasure to watch as an upcoming editor).Also the beginning is amazing with the music and the music selection in general is so pleasing. A bit chaotic and not fully comprehensible, music is like a cherry on the top. This movie is so beautiful you don't even notice that the story-line is weak and a bit absurd.

Milos Forman is settling in to America here, learning the ways of rich Puritans. The casting is just about perfect; I don't recall Buck Henry being as expressive--in that deadpan way--in a movie. The scene between Georgia Engel and Lynn Carlin, in which Engel relates stories of her husband's incredible sexual drive is wonderfully funny. The strip poker scene between Henry, Carlin and their guests Audra Lindley and Paul Benedict, that ends with Henry singing an aria, naked, on top of the dining-room table has passed into cinematic legend.Miroslav Ondricek's camera work is really exceptional; it makes a success of one scene that drags on too long--the therapy group with the participants smoking reefer. Ondricek's ability to give life to interiors is amazing: see how he cuts from the ancestral paintings to the would-be dopers, making comments on both. This man, who turns 70 this year, is a master, and if I just give a partial list of his work you will know what I mean: The Fireman's Ball, If..., O Lucky Man!, Hair, Amadeus.

A wonderful American debut from Milos Forman, who transcends a rather schematic premise ('wayward' daughter is actually quite sensible, while bourgeois parents enter a counterculture of pot-smoking and (nearly) wife-swapping orgies) with his wise European eye, which mixes clear-eyed observation with fantasy, implausibility and farce. The lead couple are acted in such a low key, you're astonished at the emotional power they generate, and while the subject matter is quite depressing, Forman's comic benevolence is always foregrounded: the convention for parents of missing children, and the accompanying lesson in parental empathy, is an American classic.

This movie is very slow, uneventful and not entertaining at all. It is difficult to believe that it has been done by the man who gave us "Hair" and "Amadeus". However, I did appreciate the last twenty minutes, where you can clearly see the paradox of the parents worrying about the behavior of their child while behaving as decadent people themselves, and then the supper with their girl's boyfriend, where again you can see that your head is not necessarily empty just because you have lots of hair on it...