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Rating: Telephone connections entwine billions of lives, almost all in the shadow of the spotlight. It is precisely these existences that experience the most intense, unresolved, and irreparable daily dramas. The love/pain triangle narrated by Schlesinger, an English director who became an American, possesses to the highest degree the same characteristics as the love affairs of the three protagonists: subdued, silent, devastating.
The artist Bob Elkin (Murray Head) is the object of love for two people: the divorced Alex (Glenda Jackson, magnificent) and Dr. Daniel (Peter Finch, superhuman). Both lovers are lost in their irrepressible feelings and risk their existence, already losing on their own: Alex, because she comes out of a sentimental failure and needs to fill a huge void. The doctor because he is homosexual in a country that considered homosexuality a criminal offense, and because he is Jewish. After Bob plays with their hearts, he abandons them, unaware of having killed two existences forever.
The beauty of Bob is the feature that makes him divine and victorious over Alex and Daniel; it seems inevitable that he enters and exits their days and their souls with ease. An angel of death who forever mocks two beings destined for defeat in the most important game of life: the game of love. Amidst the folds of relationships lies the daily life of the two lovers: the serious and conscientious doctor, almost afflicted by the doubly grave guilt of being different in a minority. Alex in the dullness of her life and the fading of time.
It seems incredible that this film follows "Midnight Cowboy" by two years, not because of the themes (we are still narrating the stories of losers), but because of the tones. "Midnight Cowboy" is kaleidoscopic, noisy, over-the-top but rightly so. Even though it is tragic, it is nonetheless vital. We are in New York, and the chaos is a vertigo, although in America, those who lose, lose doubly, are twice outcasts. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" holds a pain equally intense in every moment of its long frames, as if it were a cancer of which nothing can be said.
The long bar mitzvah scene of the doctor's nephew is exemplary and magnificent: at first glance, the sequence of the long ceremony seems unnecessary in the film's economy. But it is precisely in that long, slow progression of the ancient initiation ritual into adult life that the gravity of Doctor Daniel's condition is perceived. Personally, I was moved; the level of rarefaction and punctuality with which Schlesinger makes one FEEL a condition is dizzying.
At the time, right and left-wing moralists found this descent into the private to recount a changing society and the representation of homosexuality immoral. (I know people who, back then, during the scene of the kiss between the two men, stood up indignantly and left the cinema; is that worse, or is today's indifference regarding lives and choices, where homosexuality risks being homogenized and flattened into a bland television show?).
Besides, Schlesinger narrates not heterosexuality or homosexuality, but love or something that cannot be named but resembles a consuming fever.
Warmly recommended.
(Giovanni happypippo Natoli)
P.S.: In a brief sequence, a boy appears scratching the side of a car with a blade; one will have the opportunity to see the artist Daniel Day Lewis as a youngster.
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