Domenica maledetta domenica

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.

I first saw this at 17 in 1971 and was of course struck by the frankness in the portrayal of the relationship between Murray Head and Peter Finch. People in the suburban audience where I saw it SCREAMED when the two men first kissed. (Someone screamed at a director's screening of the film, much to Schlesinger's consternation. It turned out to be Finch's wife.) One of the reviewers complained about Head's acting, but he is playing a very shallow character whose youth and beauty attract Glenda Jackson and Finch. The film holds up really well today with its complex characters and lack of stereotypes and simple judgments about people. There is also enormous charm and humor in the film, especially in the supporting players. The imagery in the film stays with me--the dog killed by a car, the Mummy's milk in the fridge, the inner workings of telephone switching, driving through the rain in London, men and women making love, precocious children smoking dope, and so much more. It feels like life. It also made me a lifelong fan of Finch, who went on to win a posthumous Oscar for "Network," and Jackson, a two-time Oscar winner, who represents Hampstead in Parliament now. Probably my favorite film of all time.

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.

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)

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.