Living On Half A Loaf

Sunday, Bloody Sunday has a rare tension to it. When a character makes a snide remark and swallows it, the line is laughed at and the laugh is clutched. If pathos is evoked, the film's essential rationality beckons us to retreat, without regret, to a world of traffic lights, vandalsim and economic crises--the world of our daily survival. If the film's philosophic viewpoint does not satisfy us completely, it is a measure of the film's quality that we take it seriously enough to judge it by our own lives--as we do with the best art. For the film's characters live an existence as complex and seemingly arbitrary as our own, and they react honestly--if not profoundly--to their situation.

Dr. Daniel Hirsh is a homosexual and a Jew, a loner by birth, design and inclination. He accepts the position he holds in British life (that of a well-to-do bourgeois with private passions locked firmly in the closet), while rejecting both the gay life or the commitments an observant Judaism would demand. What he loves are culture, (mostly refined) pleasure, and a bisexual named Bob Elkin.

Alex Greville is a divorcee from a monied, educated class, trying to work as an employment counsellor even if she doesn't find fulfillment in that position--even if she identifies with the sacked paper-pushers she handles. Greville is a strong woman, but her emotional and intellectual resources are strained. She doesn't want to remarry (her previous marriage was, we take it, based solely on material agreements); she does want to keep her hand in the pool, hoping for a man who can give her the "whole loaf". She only gets half; she, too, falls in love with Elkin.

A kinetic sculptor. Bob Elkin is an uncomplicated boy who brings unfettered pleasure to both Greville and Hirsh, and becomes increasingly important to them. He is a free agent in society and character, and he acts like God's gift to lonely people. It is, indeed, his very irresponsibility--his sensitivity only to small things, to children and animals--which makes him so attractive to the two more interesting adults.

The trio's relationship is not a triangle, but a circle. Each knows the other two's whereabouts and doings, and none objects. But the circle is in constant danger of being squared by anxiety. The film shows us seven days of a ten-day span in the lives of Daniel. Alex and Bob. Life-affecting decisions are made, and loves are broken. During the days that aren't shown, however, just "getting along" is the major pastime: for it also fills much of the days that are shown. And getting along in the Britain of Sunday Bloody Sunday means to cope with institutions which press people into patterns, with crowds whose mass indifference breeds indifferent hate, with daily news bulletins which predict national disaster in stentorian tones of doom. (Seeing the film in the U.S. makes the voicing of Eden-like attitudes towards America seem an additional cruelty). If muted passions give the characters their interest, the way they react to dulling workday situations reveals their depths.

Elkin is impervious to outside pressure. It therefore follows that he may love Alex and Daniel, and yet not care to the extent of living with them--of helping them approach their problems on their own level. He is able to flee in the end to New York City, where a new market has opened for his luxury commodities.

What the older pair share is a sense of common mortality. Daniel knows that "people can manage on very little": his profession makes him operate on the very boundaries of life, and makes him further aware of his own limitations. He is melancholy, but he is not resigned to entropy: he helps his patients as best he can, and creates a pocket of personal substance, which sustains him even when Elkin leaves. Alex, not as self-possessed, is in a more painful position. Without channels for her intelligence, and without guidance from tradition, she relies on her better feelings, which do not help, but seize her. (When a young girl races across a street with a dog tagging behind, and the dog is killed by a truck. Alex overreacts: she immediately thinks of the possibility of the girl's death, which only frightens the youngster). Alex can finally declare that she no longer accepts Elkin on his terms--that for her, nothing, at the moment, is better than anything. But her circumstances remain unsettled, her outlook less than sanguine.

The film's openmindedness about the different types of possible compromise makes its avowal of the necessity for compromise palatable. "You've got to make things work", says Alex's mother; but to Alex, you've got to work with someone compatible to your own needs. Elkin is even less appropriate for Daniel, who's always searched for someone "courageous and resourceful"; but Daniel sacrifices his dreams for the reality he's got. The only Sunday people who don't in some way, sacrifice hopes and ideals are the Hodsons, friends of the trio, for whom Alex and Bob babysit one weekend. They are wealthy enough to be contentedly radical in a socialist state (and in, to be sure, an academic environment). But they are so godawfully cocksure of their goodness and honesty that, while they do care for others, they usually run them down with their own exuberance. Elkin also, I suppose, doesn't compromise: but one is never sure just what he has to compromise.

Director John Schlesinger and writer Penelope Gilliatt have created something free from self-pity or self-hate, even though they deal with the upper-middle-class. Their film starts with the question "Do you feel any pain?" It ends with the conclusion that people can retain emotional sensitivity, self-respect and respect for others if they are willing to build on the world that's given them. Some might say that the message is dull simply because it is quietist, or that it is appropriate only to these three people. Such reactions would--from whatever point-of-view--be puerile. The characters' yearnings are basic ones, and the anomie that helps frustrate their personal gropings is the same which permeates all industrial society. If those of us who have the simple concept of revolution but lack the stuff to make it work would be receptive to the civility and humanity of Greville and Hirsh, the world would be improved immeasurably.

Most remarkable about Sunday, Bloody Sunday from a film perspective is Schlesinger's sudden acquisition of taste and tact. The man who made New York City into a playground of straw men so that a pimp and a hustler could look like folk heroes here presents the first sequences which portray homosexuality and Jewish ethnicity without smirking at their subjects. Some affectation is still present: a wayward bedside TV set, which brings back bad memories of Sylvia Miles'; a sinuous pan up Elkin's body as seen by Alex through a shower curtain; postured bit-playing by effete types at Hirsh's house. For the most part, however, Schlesinger has not overpowered his script, but served it. With the aid of Peter Finch (Daniel), Glenda Jackson (Alex), and despite the too-callow Murray Head's Bob; with Mozart arias on the soundtrack which give musical dimension to the trio's cultural separateness; and with graceful camera plotting which tie the characters to the shape of their environment, be it park or townhouse. Schlesinger serves Miss Gilliatt inspiredly well.

There is a final question some audiences will undoubtedly ask: Why make the trio a bisexual one? But that artistic decision simply deepens Hirsh's aloofness, and the doubtfulness that he will ever achieve the sort of earthly happiness that Alex works for. By portraying a man so socially limited, Schlesinger and Gilliatt heighten their point's effectiveness.