Dos amores en conflicto

After reading about John Schlesinger's death I felt the need to revisit some of his considerable opus. I couldn't decide where to start, Billy Liar, Darling, Far From The Madding Crowd or Sunday Bloody Sunday. If a film could really penetrate the brain of a character, Sunday Bloody Sunday, showed it to me. I saw into Peter Finch's soul to such degree I was kind of embarrassed and compelled at the same time. Murray Head, personifies what Finch's character longs for and is kind of horrified by. Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch play the imperfect angles of this painfully human triangle. The charming shallowness of Murray Head's character made me understand the complexity of knowing and accepting all of our darkest contradictions. John Schlesinger was a great artist.

I recently saw Sunday, Bloody Sunday and thought it was brilliant. I was suprised it came out in 1971, it is definitely ahead of its time. The highlight of the movie is Peter Finch's role - it took guts to take a role like this back then. I'm glad he eventually went on to win the oscar for Network.

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.

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.

Perhaps due to the global discontent brought on by the Viet Nam War and then the Russian-Afgan War, the early 1970' saw the end of a period of idealism and the dawn of an age of realism, far too real in many instances. Movies were no exception to this general social trend in American and European society.

When "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was released in 1971, it was a major jolt to the "film world." There, in all its wide screen splendor and glory was a major production with a major league cast and state of the are writing, direction, and production that flaunted as comonplace the unspoken trio of adult sexual taboo: Homosexuality, Bisexuality and Insest. And this was all presented in an apparently normal setting with apparently normal persons who could be, God forbid, us.

This was no British working class low budget avant guard "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" about the people who we had too often become and through familiarity learned to despised. This was the Upper middle class world where we all imagined ourselves eventually destined to live. And the real shock of it was that we weren't repulsed or appalled. We were if anything, drawn to it. The characters are intelligent, educated, sympathetic, honest to a reasonable degree, at least with each other and very pretty to look at. The situations are all too real. The problem is that "Sunday Bloody Sunday is "life as you find it" and not "life as you'd wish it to be."

Today the shock is gone. It is a beautifully smooth and taught production to be sure, but no longer anything new. Still, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is one of the movies that changed the movies, as well as American and European Society in the middle of the second half of the Twentieth century. Don't miss a chance to see it.