CINEMA
Coming up for air
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
After weeks of garbage a film like John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday or the French Claire's Knee strikes a reviewer with a shock of recognition. Hundreds of reels of homicidal maniacs, sexual sadists, psychopaths, lunatics and assorted kinks stifling incipient hysteria with a stream of Yiddish wisecracks — and then suddenly these real people walk on to the screen, behaving intelligently and logically in situations not totally removed from the world we live in. The cinema throws off its peripheral role in society as the last congenial refuge of the insane and resumes its rightful function of providing a satisfying evening's entertainment.
Both these distinguished films achieve • their success by developing intimate, closely-analysed situations in ways which never forfeit our sympathy, never lose our interest, and nevertheless manage to steer clear of melodrama and empty rhetoric. Sunday, Bloody Sunday ('X') Leicester Square Theatre) treats of ten days in the lives of a single woman, a middle-aged doctor and the boy, a young artist they are both in love with, who shares out his time between them before flying off to New York. The two older people are clever, amusing, self-aware and yet hopelessly infatuated with the younger man. They are fully conscious of the perpetual compromises and small indignities this entails, and yet they are prepared to put up with them for the fleeting pleasure of his company in bed. Each makes an effort to secure him permanently; but they are resigned to the fact that life is far from perfect, and that a small satisfaction is better than none at all.
If this kind of subject had been averagely well directed, the result, no doubt, would have been an averagely good film; but the editing and direction here are little short of brilliant. Schlesinger has pared down each scene, and as soon as its point has been made he rapidly cuts away to another sequence — an economy which keeps us alert and gives him time to comment wittily on aspects of middle-class London life. There is a splendid family of emancipees, in which the children bathe with their mummy and daddy and are allowed to smoke pot from the age of four. and the mother bottles her own milk and puts it in the fridge for the weekend babysitter to feed the youngest with — a Stringalong habit which Marc has not yet seen fit to incorporate in his Times cartoons. There is also a black professor who works away submissively in a corner while the children crawl over his typewriter. Less lightheartedly, Schlesinger includes scenes in the West End at night which have more in common with his last film, Midnight Cowboy, than with the realities of drug addiction over here.
What, finally makes Sunday, Bloody Sunday stand out as one of the best films of the year so far are the performances of Glenda Jackson as the woman and Peter Finch as the older man. Glenda Jackson seems astonishingly to get better and better. Probably she has the best lines (the excellent screenplay is by Penelope Gilliatt, so hardly surprising), but in a role which requires of her qualities almost the opposite of those she displayed in The Music Loverc she still manages to dominate the screen. Peter Finch is another actor fine enough to profit from a really demanding role, and he accomplishes the difficult part of giving the doctor an unforced dignity which doesn't desert him through all the intricacies of his relationship with the young artist. Murray Head, in this role, is pretty colourless, Passivity is presumably a necessary part of his attraction, but he gives little indication of any quality positive enough to have attracted the other two in the first place. But this is a small blemish on a magnificent film.
Claire's Knee (' A ' Curzon), winner of the Louis Delluc award for the best French film of 1970, is written and directed by Eric Rohmer. Once again it is a director's film, very idiosyncratic and in keeping with what one might expect from the make of My Night With Maud, an earlier film in the cycle of six "moral tales" recently shown at the Academy. The moral of this particular tale would seem to be that the more one limits one's desires, the more intense they become and the more satisfactory is their fulfilment. Very Catholic, Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), a successful diplomat in his mid-thirties, meets Aurora, a Rumanian novelist in a small village on the shores of Lake Geneva. The consequence is . . . but in fact there are no consequences, only a great deal of intellectually stimulating conversation, some platonic games played and some challenges met. Love, desire, marriage, and infidelity, are pondered over. Even chastity is discussed with seriousness.
Jerome is about to get married, but Aurora, an old friend, persuades him to begin a relationship with the younger daughter of the family she is staying with in order to help her with a novel. He flirts with the girl who pretends delightfully to an experience she isn't prepared to demonstrate (a faultless, charming performance by Beatrice Romand); but he is then shaken out of his self-assurance by meeting the older sister, Claire, He conceives an ambition to caress her knee. Urged on by Aurora he at last manages to do this, and the satisfaction of such an arbitrary desire frees him from restless uncertainty about his future. If Claire's knee sounds boring and trivial, I can only assert that it kept me fascinated. Rohmer directs with the same dedication to the subject matter as Schlesinger. Every gesture is in place; not a shot is wasted. When Jerome leaves nothing has changed, but out of this small particular emerge more general truths than twenty more spectacular films might provide.
Anyone who wants to come down gently after seeing these two is recommended to The Andromeda Strain (" AA" Odeon, St Martin's Lane) a very enjoyable sciencefiction picture. What is most important about space pictures is that they should be lavish; and The Andromeda Strain employs the most striking display of gadgetry I have ever seen.
Finally, two appalling films. Little Murders (' X ' Cinecenta), is a farce about American urban violence, scripted from his own play by Jules Feiffer. I can't remember a single funny line. And Doctors' Wives (' X ' Prince Charles) which it would be nice to dismiss as unintentionally hilarious except that its humourlessness makes it hideous and offensive. One doctor commits adultery; another doctor shoots him and kills his own wife; another doctor saves the life of the first doctor (close-ups of a gory heart operation) and has a child by a coloured nurse whose life only the murderer-doctor can save; and so on. In appealing unashamedly to vicious morons the film will no doubt find a permanent place in the affections of its makers.
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