Cinema Year '25: March Discoveries
Sunday Bloody Sunday / Out 1 / 6 Underground
Hello and welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, a monthly review supplement. Our March Discoveries took us from the grandest repertory palaces of central London to the highest-bit-rendering of Netflix.
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Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971, UK)
Sunday Bloody Sunday sits at an awkward intersection of film history, as Sarah Cleary described when introducing the film as part of her Funeral Parade Queer Film Society at the Prince Charles Cinema. John Schlesinger’s previous film, Midnight Cowboy (1969), played a large part in the transition from Old Hollywood to New, but he was a generation older than the movie brats and has a body of work that’s diverse in a way that somewhat resists auteurist interpretation. And despite Sunday Bloody Sunday’s bold and unapologetic gay kiss, it’s rarely held up as a landmark of queer cinema. Maybe because of its already-jaundiced view of the sexual revolution: the excitement and utopian vision of free love has already fizzled out into the same old romantic disappointments.
It might seem like the love triangle at its centre would be a source of fiery melodrama, with the androgynous bisexual Bob (Murray Head) bouncing between his two lovers, Daniel (Peter Finch), an aging doctor, and Alex (Glenda Jackson) a directionless office worker, but their relationship is open, if divided. Schlesinger lays his scenes out with an unaffected patience, allowing problems lying much deeper than any jealousy or misunderstanding to reveal themselves.
When Alex visits her surprisingly rich parents, we see her only model for a functional relationship: her mother has laid down in front of her husband’s ugly foibles, comfortably convinced that this is all anyone could ask for. Alex and Daniel aren’t so different in their relationship with Bob. They are holding onto a man who believes he’s giving them all that he has to give—even if he’s quick to vanish whenever it gets uncomfortable—and the horrible truth is that he may be right. He is a beautiful empty vessel, which seems to be the only way he stands above, and will inevitably have to move on from the depressive city he’s surrounded by.
Schlesinger’s vision of London in the seventies, all interpersonal pettiness, constantly ringing phones and awkward traffic, resonates into today because we so vividly understand the collective misery of the British people, resigned that nothing will get better and consoled only by a constant hum of grief. And like a depressive Jonathan Demme, he often pans over to this background hum, allowing us to share a few moments with the crowd. In one incidental, but totally heartbreaking scene in a pharmacy, we pan across a collection of faces in quiet desperation; they are, like everyone else in the film, battered, defeated and deeply British. EH
Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman, 1971, France)
Outside of our own screenings, I don’t know if I've ever had such a wholesome time at a film event in London as at Out 1. This weekend marathon at The ICA (roughly 7 hours on Saturday and 6 on Sunday, with breaks after each episode) was the first for the film in London since 2012, and the second time I had watched Rivette’s opus since an ill-advised covid isolation viewing.
As such, the film’s exuberant images felt fresh to my eyes. The maddening opening 90 minutes, which alternates rehearsals for Aeschylus’ Prometheus with Jean-Pierre Leaud’s antics, mutely menacing diners with his harmonica, pale next to the hours that follow. One is suffocated by Rivette’s exquisite rendering of Paris as a mix of claustrophobic interiors and even more frightening street scenes, where everyone looks at you funny, and kids might chase you down the street while you just try to enact some paranoid scheme. The push and pull between duration and excitement, and the wispy, mysterious hints at the supernatural, must have felt on point in post-’68 Paris, but it’s positively revelatory in our present conspiracy age.
What made this screening special were the breaks, which permitted the audience a quick chance to refresh and reflect. Kudos to the ICA for generously laying on free teas and coffees across the weekend, and for fostering a welcoming atmosphere even in the face of the 100-odd specimens who would eschew the year’s first sunny weekend to sit through a 14 hour French New Wave film. A few unwanted heckles aside, the audience was respectful and engaged. In any case, who would fun police or blame the humble touretted for their excitement at reaching the end of this epic weekend together. By the time the post-film drinks wound down in a perfectly Rivettian Chinatown O'Neills, the members of the thirteen had finally revealed themselves. BF
6 Underground (Michael Bay, 2019, USA)
If anyone could get a career-best performance out of Ryan Reynolds, it would be Michael Bay, formal maximalist. 6 Underground is certainly juvenile and mean-spirited enough to suit Reynolds’ star persona, itself largely built on pouting sardonicism and endless appeals to the lowest common denominator. Sadly, his turn as Magnet S. Johnson, a globe-trotting crime-fighting billionaire who made his fortune off of magnets (?), is less Bruce Wayne than a thinly-veiled Reynolds variant, with all the depth you’d expect from a man whose name is part-career description, part-dick joke.
Bay, for his part, takes affront at the idea that his films are merely loud and dumb, as opposed to the loudest and dumbest. Blood sprays pornographically into people's eyes (which prompts Dave Franco to make a “She squirted!” crack), nuns swear aggressively at the camera, and pigeons defecate noisily on a car windshield—and that’s all just in the opening set piece. Bay’s camera is almost perversely tight to the action, flipping between whip-fast tracking shots, close-ups drowned in lens flare, and all manner of fixed-vantage perspectives, from behind a steering wheel, or beneath a car’s rear axle, all cut with a sugar rush dynamism.
Yes, the character work is mind-numbingly rote, yes, the flashbacks really drag down what should be a zippy, amoral barnbuster, and yes, I may have fallen asleep during one of the talkier sections ( blame daylight savings), but is anyone here for such trifles as nuanced characters and engaging dialogue? If you want a film in which someone grinds down a staircase rail on a skateboard, pops off, shoots a grenade launcher into the open window of a black SUV (the large-caliber projectile breaking a goon’s nose in the process) before blowing the car to kingdom come, all backed by some of the most garish pop-rock needle drops this side of an Imagine Dragons concert, strap in—you’re in for a bumpy ride. BR