Words: 1825
Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger) 1971 “Cinema and television sap and leach the narrative power away; insidiously impose their own conformities, their angles, their limits of vision; deny the existence of what they cannot capture. As with all frequently repeated experience, the effect is paradigmatic, affecting by analogy beyond the immediately seen ??? indeed, all spheres of life where a free and independent imagination matters”. That’s how John Fowles felt about new medias in 1968, when his major master piece The Magus was unhappily adapted to a film.
This description of cinema matches perfectly with 1970’s tendencies of British cinema. Private and restricted once, the industries opened towards the world, considering the influences of Hollywood positive and taking example of it in some way. Synopsis Daniel Hirsh, Jewish doctor (Peter Finch) and divorced, middle-aged woman Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) are both involved in a love triangle with a young bisexual designer Bob Elkin (Murray Head). Not only they are aware that Elkin is seeing both of them, but they do know each other through mutual friends.
They are afraid to loose Bob, so they are trying to deal as good as possible with the situation. For Alex, the relationship is bound with a growing disillusion about her life, failed marriage and uneasy childhood. For Daniel, it represents an escape from the repressed nature of his Jewish upbringing. When Elkin decides to leave the country, Alex and Daniel decide to meet each other (for the first time in the film, ant at the very end). This departure is an alarm for them, an understanding that its time to move on.
Sunday, bloody… The title itself conveys ambivalence of various sorts. It is unlikely that many in the film’s audience around the world would have been attuned to the past political resonances of the phrase “Bloody Sunday”. This had been the name given to an infamous episode of street violence in London involving police and socialist demonstrators back in November 1887, and it was also the nickname of one of the anarchist characters in G. K. Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, published in 1908.
Besides Bloody Sundays took place in 1905, a massacre in Saint Petersburg, 1920, a violence incident in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence, in 1938, police violence against unemployed protesters in Vancouver, British Columbia etc. The phrase will be reused again in a political context some months after the film release to name the day when thirteen civilians were killed by British paratroopers during a protest march in Northern Ireland, but nothing so specific of turbulent is even hinted at the film or by its title. The action starts on a Friday and covers two whole weeks together with all days in between.
There is a political subtext to the action, figured neatly on the soundtrack by news broadcasts on a car radio announcing wage blow-outs, threatened strikes and the imminent crisis in foreign exchange rates; 1970-71 was an unstable period in British politics with the blow-outs of the long-term Labour government and the return of the Conservatives bent on limiting the legal powers of the trade unions. But if there is a sense in the film that the best of the times in the nation’s political history is now past, there is nothing to suggest that this is yet the worst of times. It seems to aware that more somber times are to come.
Only children find the love affair between two men “funny” ( first homosexual kiss on the screen). The inside Sunday Bloody Sunday was directed by Schlesinger on his return from America. While Daniel and Alex are discussing the possibility of living in America, radio and newspaper headlines report TUC (Trades Union Congress) meetings, the unemployment figures and “Call Girls Out on Strikes”. The soundtrack includes the trio “Soave sia il vento”, from Mozart’s opera, this trio is representative of the love games, betrayals, and it evokes the emotional politics and the diplomatic interplay of personal and family relationship.
Same trio was used in Closer (2004), Mike Nichol’s film on related themes. The costumes and set design, the world of major characters and most of the minor ones, is supremely comfortable. Bur this comfort suggests the viewer to ask himself, whether this casual world matches with the outsides, with the reality. This overprotection is not helpful for people to manage their life and to be happy. Though, Schlesinger in a 1991 interview says: “I’m not a particularly political animal… If the audience has learned a little more about other people, that’s fine”. The question of the youth is brought to the screen.
Alex brings Bob to babysit for friends’ children over the weekend: they precociously smoke pot (they know where their parents hide it), ask Bob whether he is bourgeois and comment on the progress of the lover’s relationship. Lucy, six going on seven girl, imagines she is somehow above conventional class categories and expectations. “Has he walked out on you? ??? Guess that’s why you’re in a bad mood,” – Lucy asks Alex. Schlesinger’s film highlights some worrying facts about how much people’s attitudes to relationships and each other have changed over just two generations.
For Alex and for Daniel there is a sense of growing dissatisfaction with the menage, and both want more, even if it means doing without the self-centered Bob. Alex, a business efficiency expert, takes a new older lover (one of her clients). This could be a case of the bourgeois lady protesting too much her sexual independence from Bob, trying to live by his insouciant philosophy (“We’re free to do what we want”), while continuing to suffer from his more sustained two-timing (“Other people’, she tells him, ‘often do what they don’t want to do at all”).
Daniel suffers the frustrations of this twist on the eternal triangle. He has not entirely denied himself the measure of freedom opened up by the recent decriminalization of homosexual acts. Even being committed to his relationship with Bob, he still cannot bring himself to tell his conservative Jewish family about it. They are trying to marry him off, and he pretends that he didn’t find the right person yet. Alex and Daniel return to old certainties (Alex to her parents who have “worked at” marriage, says her mother, Daniel to the Orthodox rituals of the faith in which he was raised).
For both, Bob is a disappointment of their ideals but he cannot be turned into what they want him to be. At the end, when Bob left both of them (Alex and Daniel) to further his career in America, Daniel pronounces: “All my life I’ve been looking for someone courageous and resourceful, not like myself, and he’s not it…But something. We were something. You’ve no right to call me to account”. This epilogue is also a monologue, delivered by Finch straight to the camera. It is the last Sunday evening in the film.
This monologue packs a special punch here because nearly all the preceding scenes have been fairly realistic conversation pieces. Now, we, the audience, appear to be the only people he is addressing. When Daniel speaks to us, we most fully and clearly see into his nature, even as he holds a mirror up to each one of us. In addition to learning more about Daniel, we also sense our common humanity ??? more important than our personal sexual orientation, or gender, or age, or situation in life.
Here is something which film or literature has never seen before: a gay man as everyman, every human. An alienation effect that is also deeply involving, it makes a powerful cinematic moment. Schlesinger’s picture graphically documents the possibilities for loneliness, the frequency of aloneness, in the big, glamorous, proudly progressive cosmopolitan capital replete with cultural diversions. Sunday become a symbol of a free time after the working week, which can be spent with some one you love. But when there is no one, Sunday turns to be a loneliest day of all.
The contrast between being alone ??? few films spend as much time with each major character in isolation, just being themselves ??? and being in a crowd (whether a big bustling family like the Hodsons or the dozens of people at the bar mitzvah or crowds on Londoners on the streets or in the parks) is strong. Although none of the characters actually pronounce the phrase “Bloody Sunday”, it is in the spirit of confronting, transcending, getting over and not giving in to the sense of desolation the day can embody that the most of them will manage to go on surviving at least, if not move on the fresh directions. Sometimes people survive better apart”, says Daniel once. A recurrent motif throughout the whole film is the continual disconnection between the main characters, who seem to spend more time of their time on the phone talking to the operator that to each other. This film is highly personal for the director and the scriptwriter, Penelope Gilliat, whose childhood was used as the background for the Alex story. Schlesinger says that he made this film very personal, because it is based on a true story, happened to him, but without the love triangle. He crossed this experience with Gilliat thoughts and the film was born. To conclude
Through such recent developments as the decriminalisation of homosexuality or the invention of the contraceptive pill, Daniel and Bob and Alex and the generation they represent are freer that their parents or other elders were to discover, explore, test possibilities within themselves, especially their sexual selves. Of curse there had been many British films, from at least the early 1960s on, which touched in various ways on these generational changes in sexual mores – and that, in broaching the subject through a popular medium such as cinema, may have done much to abet the changes or facilitate public discussion of them.
Pertinent examples include The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Ken Hughes, 1960), where Finch playing the title role was given his first opportunity of straying from his accustomed heterosexual territory; Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961), regarded as the first commercial film to deal expressly with homosexuality in a contemporary setting; and Schlesinger’s own Darling. But Sunday Bloody Sunday was in advance of all these movies perhaps ??? and certainly in advance of any American movie of the same period ??? in the way it “normalized”, refused to eroticize or make a pathology of its central characters’ behaviour and feelings.
Bibliography Penelope Gilliat, Sunday Bloody Sunday, ed. Corgi, London, 1971. Pauline Kael, Deeper into Movies, ed. Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, 1973. Brian McFarlane, The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, ed. Wallflower Press, London, 2005. Justine Ashby, Andrew Higson, British cinema, Past and Present, ed. Routledge, London, 2000. Amy Sargeant, British Cinema, a critical history, BFI publishing, London, 2005. + google. com Wikipedia. com Imdb. com