The film centres on Donna (Michèle Chicoine) and Gail (Jackie Burroughs), two young women who work together at a dress factory and live together as roommates, tracing the evolution and decline of their friendship in a documentary-style format.[1] It shows the currents that brought them together and the facets of their natures that first made them seem compatible but eventually drove them apart. Their story reflects, to a degree, the situation of anyone who has ever shared the life of another person.
The film makes use of the then-novel device of an unreliable narrator,[1] ultimately revealing that the film is much more about the narrator's skewed perceptions of the women's relationship than it is about the women themselves.[3] It was inspired in part by the contemporaneous films of Jean-Luc Godard.[1]
The characters of Donna and Gail recurred in Owen's 1967 feature film The Ernie Game.[4] Prior to the release of The Ernie Game, in which Donna and Gail were involved in a love triangle with Alexis Kanner's Ernie, some critics who had seen only Notes perceived Donna and Gail as being in a quasi-lesbian relationship; however, Owen demurred on this perception by saying "I really don't know, because, well, what is a lesbian relationship?"[5]
^Maria Topalovich, And the Genie Goes To...: Celebrating 50 Years of the Canadian Film Awards. Stoddart Publishing, 2000. ISBN0-7737-3238-1. pp. 77-79.