This film is set in a small Connecticut town in winter during the dark days of Watergate. This community houses a range of discontented middle-class families desperate to escape from their problems, and use sex as the means. The adults start having affairs and wife-swapping parties, while the children are more concerned with losing their virginity.
The parallel experiences of the adults and children of one family are shown as they experiment with sex and drugs in an increasingly desperate attempt to create meaning in their shallow, bourgeois lives, unaware that a storm is fast approaching.
This haunting drama won the Best Screenplay award in Cannes and was a smash hit with the critics for its powerful evocation of the listless decadence that characterised the closing years of the '70s.
The Ice Storm is a Film programme that first aired in 1997 and has been classified a 15 certificate.
