Dos amores en conflicto

Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) is a London divorced working mom who is having an affair with modern sculptor Bob Elkin (Murray Head). Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch) is a traditional Jewish doctor who is suffering from mysterious pains and is also having an affair with Elkin. Both know about the other relationship as well as having mutual friends. Both are willing to live with the situation but it can't really last.

For all the affairs going on, this movie is very cold. All three people are a little emotionally dead inside. It's not a fun movie. It does not make this a compelling watch. Their relationships are like slow sleepwalking in sadness. The constant emotional self-destruction grounded me down.

This was a step forward for Schlesinger. After the grim working class stories--A Kind of Loving, with Alan Bates and June Ritchie miserable over an unwanted pregnancy; Billy Liar with Tom Courtenay constantly fantasizing as a way of coping with his dull life--we got Darling, a slick bit of commercial film-making with Julie Christie. Then the trip to New York for Midnight Cowboy, a picture so empty, and so honored by the Academy, that I feared he would become just another hack, a la Clive Donner.

Instead we get a character study, one of the best films of the last three decades. Daniel Hirsch is drowning in respectability; a Jewish doctor who can't muster the courage to come out because the congregation wouldn't understand, so resigns himself to matchmaking attempts by his mother. Alex Greville works with high level job candidates, whom she can sleep with to chase the boredom away. She wants a husband, but her mother advises her to accept that half a loaf is better than none. Bob Elkin is the love object for both; a handsome and really shallow young man who thinks about his future a lot, and realizes that it doesn't involve either Alex or Daniel.

So many wonderful scenes: Bob and Alex visit friends for the weekend. Bob raids the fridge, finds some milk. Alex tells him it's mother's milk--phwoah! Daniel has a party; a woman starts yelling at her husband about the au pair girl he's been sleeping with. Bob wants to leave; his aesthetic sense is offended by this unseemly display of emotion. Daniel wants him to stay, to provide moral support, but Bob is just too selfish to listen. There is always the feeling that disaster is just around the corner, that the triangle will soon collapse.

Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch are just about perfect as the adults in this situation, and Murray Head, if he doesn't show any great acting ability, at least makes us believe in his desirability. He went on to perform roughly the same role as Annie Girardot's lover in La Mandarine.

As the 1960s become the 1970s in London, England, a successful male doctor and divorced, female recruitment consultant both try to maintain a relationship with a self-centred younger man.

Fascinating period piece, exploring the reality of the late sixties 'free love' ideal - she loves Bob, he love Bob, Bob loves... well, nothing substantial, as it turns out. Mixing in ghastly 'of their time' friends (ex-hippie-types Alva and Bill and their dreadful kids), Sunday, Bloody Sunday is at once both dated and contemporary - set in a time of economic chaos and dealing with a taboo which, in 2009, still seems at least unsettling. Jackson and Finch are brilliant, apologetically yet furiously settling for all the crumbs they can get from their cool younger lover, although under Schlesinger's direction, Head is much less successful - whilst he captures Bob's egotistical nature, there's no counter-balance of charm, leaving the viewer wondering exactly what is either Alex or Daniel really see in him.

Ground-breaking story-telling then, and all kudos to Gilliatt, Sherwin, Janni, Schlesinger and Peter Finch for bringing this grown-up picture of early 70s contemporary life to the screen.

Exploring its IMDb trivia page, I read an item suggesting that John Schlesinger's "Sunday Bloody Sunday", a "Brokeback Mountain" of its era, didn't win a single Oscar because of its controversial subject, and that Finch didn't win the Oscar because of that kiss with Murray Head. And so Gene Hackman won for "The French Connection" because he played a more 'macho' type of guy fitting the standards of Hollywood back then in 1971. Now, there are so many wrong assumptions I don't know where to begin.

First of all, the performance of Hackman was as critically acclaimed as Peter Finch playing Dr. Daniel Hirsh. Secondly, Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy", while keeping the relationship between Rico and Joe Buck closer to the 'bromance' archetype, left enough implicitness and ultimately won the Best Picture Oscar. Finally, I believe it would be missing the point to make "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" a movie about homosexuality, and I doubt that was the intent of John Schelinsger or screenwriter Penelope Gilliat.

"Sunday, Bloody Sunday" handles the same-sex relationship subject in such a casual and matter-of-factly way you can tell that it was a deliberate choice not to leap into spectacularity or voyeurism. Granted that one kiss we get from the beginning sets the tone and looks like Schlesinger opening the final lock that contained his narrative inhibitions; right after it, the film strikes for how restrained, reasonable and measured it is. It's a word I've encountered more than once in both Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby's reviews: 'civilized'. To some degree, there's something civilized in the three characters' upbringing that spilled over their adult life and incidentally to the storytelling approach, more polished than you'd expect.

Now, I won't be the reviewers' review and I wasn't disappointed by the film as much I was disappointed by my incapability to integrate what is so great about. I guess fifty years after its release, the shock factor has worn out and for me, the film became a sort of exercise in normality with scenes lingering on needless details especially during the expositional parts. We gather that Alex (Glenda Jackson) is the baby sitter to five kids who belong to a very bourgeois and liberal family (the parents accept the relationship with Bob) and Daniel is a middle-aged celibate who can't wait for the weekend to be with Bob.

Basically, we have two people passionately in love with a man and accepts to share him literally and figuratively. But Bob, being the bohemian artist sculptor acting his age, gives so little of himself with the exception of his body and a portion of his time, it's hard for the viewer to consider him as a fully-dimensioned character and I understand that his likability isn't the point. And I agree that the film isn't much about love than a sort of resignation from the two sad persons in the name of love. But their patience is challenged again with the opportunity offered to Bob to travel to America and show his work.

Schleinsger patiently, without making any fuss about the relationships show love between reasonable people, and it ironically leads to the film's most memorable moments involving other characters. This is the kind of film where a kid is shown smoking pot, a young Daniel Day-Lewis is among a street-gang keying expensive cars, a dog dies in a freak accident and two couples argue during charades... so many interesting things happening and yet the director is forcing us to bath in that muddy triangular love filled with more expectations and waiting than true moments of passions. Maybe because love is worth all the waiting and as Ebert pointed out, "something is better than nothing".

This is a strange film seriously, strange because there are so many powerful moments that hit the right chord, the opening dialogue between Daniel and his patient starts off very well until it's cut because Daniel has an important phone call. There's another discussion between Alex and her mother (Peggy Ashcroft) where she understands that marital life can be devoid of passion and she tried to leave her husband until realizing that there was more than a meaning to her life she needed, maybe a presence is enough. We never see the mother again. Then there's a great interaction between Alex and a client (Tony Britton) fired because of age discrimination and I could feel a deeper connection than with Alex.

Daniel is given other shining moments, one with a former lover with a heroin addiction. There's also an extended sequence where Daniel gets a little more density and we see his background during a Bar Mitzvah celebration, a tradition-bound jewish family trying to find him a wife and the pressure is obviously a hint on why he chose to live a rather recluse life and we can see what's easting him. Bob however isn't given no other interactions whatsoever except with Daniel and Alex, playing a double role as someone who drives and dampers, the lives of two good persons who'd do everything for him.

"Sunday, Bloody Sunday" insists on the fact that we sometimes miss a great deal of our lives because we're in love with someone who don't deserve it, but the consolation of being in love is paradoxically greater than the chagrin caused by that love. That's how intelligent and modern "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" is, raising some aspects of the modern couple that would ring even truer in our times of solitudes and Internet-driven desires, where love has lost a meaning while still being the meaning of everything.

But for all its capability to provide great and sober scenes, I'm afraid the film hasn't dated as well as many classics of the era. It is highly marked by the 1970s and the insistance on the social crisis never exactly finds a point of convergence within the story (liberal crisis? Freedom?), the film could as well have talked about IRA to seek relevance (though the title had me fooled)

You spend your time flitting from one nest to another, you kind of toss a coin, follow your nose, to find what you discover, could be Alex for a while, then might be Daniel's time to smile, the best of both worlds if you get time to recover. Alas, both partners find it trickier than you, as you leap from pad to pad one feels eschewed, because they want you to themselves, want you to put back on the shelves, the other copy, and close the door, as you withdraw.

A little bit dated but three fine performances that are as engaging as they were back then, although you may have a stronger connection if there are similarities in the characters plights that link to your own tale.