Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)

"I've had this business of anything is better than nothing. There have got to be times when nothing is better than anything." --Alex (Glenda Jackson) 

Today I felt compelled to view and write about one of my (new) all-time favorite movies, Sunday Bloody Sunday. The plot of the film is simple yet provocative: Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), a straight woman, and Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch), a gay man, are each having an affair with the same man (Murray Head). Here is the trailer, which definitely serves the movie's themes well: 

The first time I watched this film was only back in July. I was ill that day and bedridden, and, as a Glenda Jackson fan, I had checked this film out from the library on a whim. There are only a handfull of times in which I was watching a film and wished it would never end; Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of those films. The characters' lives, fears, anxieties, and frustrations are so real, so palpable, that I could not tear myself away. As soon as it was over, I grabbed my laptop and ordered myself the blu ray.

Sunday Bloody Sunday is often touted as being one of the most moving films about relationships, but to me this is actually the best movie about living alone I have ever seen. In Alex and Daniel, we see two intelligent, hard-working people who have both...settled. Bob, the lover, is a shallow, self-absorbed loser in many ways. There are some who have criticized the film for having two such complex people in love with such a bozo, but I think that's the point: throughout the film, which takes place over the course of only about ten days, we see Daniel and Alex both sampling what they want from relationships--children, stability, romance--but they never quite make it there. It makes sense for them both not only to accept Bob's greedy terms--that they have to share him, essentially--but also that they fall for him. 

Both Alex and Daniel feel so real in this film; I identified with Alex so strongly--perhaps more than any other character in a movie--and Glenda Jackson plays her with a blend of toughness and vulnerability. (Also, the fact that Alex takes all of the books in her divorce and nothing else--and that her family is puzzled by this--felt like something I would do. I've never been married, let alone divorced, but I completely understood that one!)

The first half of the film takes place over one weekend in which we see Bob alternating between Alex and Daniel. Alex has agreed to babysit her sister's children, all FIVE of them, while the sister, her husband, and a professor all go away for the weekend. At the suggestion of her sister, Alex decides to bring Bob along for what she calls "a proper weekend." She rushes out the door when we first see her character on a Friday night, tossing her dirty coffee cup into the sink and tripping over her ashtray, which she just leaves on the floor. The children are loud as can be and almost out of control, but so very cute. The eldest, Lucy, who appears to be about 10, is the one with whom Alex identifies, as we come to see later. 

Watching this movie for the seventh or eighth time (I've lost count), I did catch some new things. For one, when Alex is rushing out the door, she grabs what I realized tonight were children's books and stuffs them into her bag. She seems incredibly happy when she and Bob are watching the kids together: she plays with them outside, cuddles them, and seems blissful. It is when Bob suddenly leaves, however, on Saturday evening, that we see this all fall apart. Bob leaves to go to Daniel--of whom Alex is very aware--and Alex is devastated. Later, she makes fudge for the children, but eats some of it herself, sitting alone, crying. She tries to cuddle one of her other nieces, who only wants to get back to playing. The self-imposed isolation as a result of Bob's abandoning her reinforces the fact that this dream life--house, kids, husband--is something that will forever be out of her reach. Indeed, the next day, Sunday, we see a similar fate, which Alex and Bob take the children to the park, only to have something tragic happen, which prompts Alex to have flashbacks--done most appealingly by director John Schlesinger--in which she identifies with Lucy. Also, a bit of trivia: the park scene marks the film debut of...Daniel Day-Lewis! He's about 14 years old here, playing a little punk who scratches up cars (at 1:35):

Despite her divorce, Alex still wears her wedding ring, which is a emblem of how frozen she is. She works at a job she hates and spends much of the film composing her resignation letter; she is watching children she genuinely loves but who don't belong to her; her boyfriend is involved with another man; and her parents, we see later, want her to return to her ex-husband. Yet, Alex remains a resilient character; she endures the painful journey of this film in which she learns it is possible to reject the sentimental lie about the glories of domesticity and be okay. As the quote at the beginning of this review sums up: "There are times when nothing has to be better than anything."

Daniel is in a similarly trapped position. As a Jewish doctor whose family, as we learn during his nephew's Bar Mitzvah, has no idea he is gay, he seems to exist for the sake of other people. Patients call him and pop into his house frequently, and he always puts his own life aside for them. Much like Alex identifies with Lucy, Daniel is reminded of his own Bar Mitzvah, which provokes powerful memories. When he is at the nephew's party, which is nothing short of a gala, Daniel is isolated in the crowd, so to speak. His family has seated him next to a woman in the hopes he will "finally" have a girlfriend...much like Alex's sister wants her to have a weekend alone with Bob and the children. And neither situation leads to any sort of "happily ever after."

This film is revolutionary in many ways, but especially in the honesty with which it portrays a gay couple. There is a passionate kiss between the two of them, one that was shocking in its day, and we see Daniel and Bob in bed a few times. One of the most significant revelations of this film is that Daniel is a man first and a gay man second. Truly, throughout the film his sexuality feels almost irrelevant; instead, the audience is invested in his feelings, struggles, and, ultimately, disappointments. In a way, Sunday Bloody Sunday may be more important to the portrayal of gay people in film than Brokeback Mountain. 

As I said earlier, Sunday Bloody Sunday is the best movie about living alone that I have ever seen, and I stress this because although the movie centers on the "relationship among three sensual people" (as the tagline from the 70's goes), it's really about the failure of this relationship. Daniel and Alex are isolated and alone; they never quite fit in among their families or their friends, and neither of them find any kind of "true love" by the film's end. One of my favorite scenes is when Alex returns to her apartment after being with the children all weekend. After being bombarded constantly with so much noise and chaos, she is now completely alone; her apartment is silent--uncomfortably silent. She enters and sees her dirty dishes still in the sink. She scans the room, taking in the mess and the quiet, after which she spots her turned over ashtray, picks up the cigarette butts, and rubs the ashes into the carpet with her foot while the screen fades to black. This is a powerful image to me; as an aunt who lives alone, I could fully understand the weight of emotions flooding her in that scene. It's so simple, but so relatable and real. 

Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of the truest films I've ever seen, which is something absent from today's movies. The only stories we ever see are what I call "man movies": comic book films, biopics about white men, or true stories about white men. I'm at a loss trying to think of a film from the past five years with a woman character half as complex as Alex Greville--or even a man half as complicated as Daniel. There are no stories (and certainly no original stories) in today's films about everyday life. Nothing. 

Sunday Bloody Sunday is a masterpiece. Truly, the depth of this film cannot be overstated. I have barely begun to scratch the surface of this beautiful film, despite my lengthy review. It's a beautiful, sensual, and sentient film about two people who have allowed themselves to settle. 

Grade: A+

Whore (1991)

I'm just gonna say it: I'm a Ken Russell fanatic. 

In the seventies, Ken was unstoppable: Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, Savage Messiah, Mahler, Tommy--all of these films are masterpieces. I would go so far as to argue no other director had a more innovative, artistic, and masterful run of movies in the seventies than he. Granted, there are a few contenders--Martin Scorsese and John Schlesinger come to mind--but not even those two could touch Ken's creativity and innovation, which is what makes the critics' vilification of him puzzling and infuriating. Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, for instance, constantly savaged his movies, branding him "extravagant" and "eccentric." In fact, Kael said she thought Ken should have a stake driven through him for The Music Lovers. As a result of so much vitriol, Ken had increasing difficulty getting funding in the eighties and by the nineties was considered washed up, a "has been." 

Poster for Whore

For Russell fans, watching his late work is like watching an angel fall. There are nuggets of brilliance, but the cracks left by shoestring budgets from the late 80s on is palpable and leaves those of us still fawning over his early work feeling mournful. Whore is one prime example of this. 

It's worth noting Whore was released the same year as Pretty Woman, a film Russell despised for its cheesy glamorization of prostitution. Indeed, Whore does not glamorize anything about the oldest profession. It's a stark, unflinching look at the world prostitutes inhabit, the title being perhaps the most blatant aspect. 

The film stars Theresa Russell (no relation to Ken) as Liz, a prostitute who is trying to escape her pimp and find a better life. The film takes place over the course of one day, giving the audience a glimpse into what her life would be like, while telling her life story through flashbacks. The entire movie is edited in rondo, much like Ken's experimental (and, to me, brilliant) film Mahler. This style works on many levels, and I was deeply moved by the contrast between where she is in the present and what happened to her in the past. 

The most innovative part of this movie is the narration: Liz looks directly into the camera for much of the film, which positions Whore as probably the only feminist look at prostitutes I have seen in a movie. 

In 1975, Laura Mulvey crafted the term "the male gaze" in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" to refer to the way women are depicted in film...and how the audience views them. She basically argues women are presented as objects of the male characters; they exist only to show the men's feelings or conflicts; they have no character of their own. She also says women are objectified by the audience, too--even if women are in the audience--because we view the women on screen just as the men in the film do. Of course, I'm oversimplifying, but for the purposes of this review, these are the most important things to take away.

bell hooks, one of America's best feminist theorists, writes of the "oppositional gaze," arguing women have the power to look back. This is exactly what Whore does so well.

Think about the representations of prostitutes we've encountered on film: Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Shelly Long in Night Watch. These women are filmed so that we view them through Richard Gere's and Henry Winkler's eyes--indeed the eyes of everyone else in stories! They exist to be pretty, sexy, but still have hearts of gold. They are not supposed to have any value in the movie other than showing us what the male characters are going through. It's an exploitative, misogynist presentation of women and perhaps the most misogynist of all: not only are they objectifying women, but they are objectifying female characters whose existence depends on exploiting their bodies and their sexuality. 

In Whore, Liz stares directly into the camera, challenging you to see her as an object. She recounts horrible stories, the most terrifying being when she accepts a customer who is in a van, only to be beaten and brutalized. In that scene, and in fact for almost all of the movie, we do not see Liz naked at all. We see her pulled behind a curtain and we hear her scream and the sounds of punches, but we don't see it. This was a subtle but provocative choice on Ken's part because it places the emphasis on the terror of the situation, not only Liz's body. Her voice narrates the scene as well, which enables Liz to have power over how we as the audience interpret the scene and makes the two men's voices completely irrelevant. This simple choice actually challenges the male gaze and puts the woman at the center of the storytelling. 

The entire film is shot this way. In fact, few characters other than Liz even have any dialogue. She gradually digs farther and farther back into her past, revealing her marriage to an alcoholic abuser, how she escaped him with her little boy, and how she became a prostitute. The most moving parts of the film are definitely when she talks about how her son is in foster care. There is nothing sanitized about this presentation, which I found refreshing and quite moving. 

Casting Theresa Russell was an effective choice, as well. Rather than casting someone who looks like a movie star, like Julia Roberts, Ken's choice of Theresa brings more realism to the story. Theresa was not skinny and looks like someone you might know. She also brought a brashness and edge to the character, making Liz truly seem like a woman who has a rough life--a quality that strengthens the movie.

The few qualms I have with the film undoubtedly were the consequences of the minute budget in which Ken had to operate. The music is too over the top in scenes in which Liz's violent pimp shows up, and there are a few wacky scenes in the present day portions of the movie. 

One narrative problem is the fact that, at least an hour into the movie, after we have become accustomed to Liz telling her story, the pimp has a few minutes in which he talks to the camera. It felt out of place and, most important, at odds with the powerful oppositional gaze we have come to relish from Liz. Still, the pimp's dialogue is revolting and reflects just how evil and abusive he is. In a way, one could argue this brief interlude with the pimp is Ken's way of truly denouncing the male gaze: we are forced to look at Liz just as the pimp does, and it makes us queasy and guilty because we have come to see her as a person. 

When Whore came out, it was given a NC-17 rating although Pretty Woman was rated R. Ken felt he was being punished for telling the truth, and he did have a point. However, Whore is about reality, and I'm not sure anyone under 17 should watch this film--not because it's shocking, and not because of nudity (of which there is little), but because the subject matter is handled so unapologetically and so blatantly. Frankly, The Wolf of Wall Street is far more explicit than Whore, but Whore's embracing of a prostitute's reality and its forcing the audience to examine their own prejudices is more unsettling than anything in The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Whore has some structural issues and does feel like it was made with very little money, but it definitely has value. It is not Ken Russell's best--not by a long shot--but it is a worthy contribution to his canon. 

Grade: B-

Raging Bull (1980)

Last night I watched Raging Bull for the fifth or sixth time (I have lost count), and I still have at best mixed feelings about it. From a directing standpoint, an editing standpoint, an acting standpoint, a cinematography standpoint--truly, any aspect of filmmaking--Raging Bull is a masterpiece. However, there is something missing from the film for me that weakens its pathos and overall emotional pull. At just over two hours, it feels much longer. It is a beautiful film in many ways, but may also be the most violent film Martin Scorsese has ever made by a tremendous margin. 

Released in 1980, which was the same year of David Lynch's The Elephant Man, Robert Redford's directorial debut in Ordinary People, and Sissy Spacek's lovely performance in Coal Miner's Daughter, Raging Bull certainly was in good company. I've seen all of these movies and enjoy them all for different reasons, but Raging Bull is the one that haunts me the most, and not for necessarily good reasons. 

The film chronicles real life boxer Jake LaMotta's rise and fall in his boxing career, and it is a brutal, agonizing decline. Robert De Niro, whose performance is perfection here, got into incredible shape for the boxing sequences, then gained over 60 pounds to play LaMotta in his later years. It is a breathtaking transformation and one that anyone even mildly interested in acting or film must see. He captures LaMotta's anger, stupidity, paranoia, and (in my opinion) personality disorder flawlessly. One of the most perfectly shot, edited, and acted scenes is his final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson. If you've never seen this film before, you must watch this:

The editing in this scene is brilliant. Spike Lee points out that one of the greatest things about this movie is the boxing choreography, and it is perfect. The cuts of the lights, the punches, the blood--we learn so much about LaMotta as a person through these boxing sequences, and none more than in the clip above.

Although Raging Bull is recognized as one of the great collaborations between Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, many people fail to realize this was the first in a long and masterful line of collaborations between Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, who is without a doubt one of the great editors of the sound era. If you feel I'm overstating, just watch this interview with Scorsese and Wang Kar Wai in which they both gush over Schoonmaker's talent (13:00 minutes in):

Since 1980, Thelma has edited all of Scorsese's movies and now practically has a telepathic relationship with him. She's been nominated seven times for Best Film Editing, and she's won three Oscars--the first of which was for Raging Bull (The Aviator  and The Departed were her other wins). For some reason, every self-described feminist I know who is interested in film does not know anything about Schoonmaker, which bewilders me and speaks to how much editors are overlooked, especially women. In any case, Scorsese and Schoonmaker's collaboration on Raging Bull is nothing short of ingenious. The cuts on the Sugar Ray sequence are of course only one small example.

This film also marks the first collaboration between Scorsese and Joe Pesci. Anyone who is familiar with their later work, particularly Goodfellas and Casino, knows that in the Pesci-De Niro relationship, De Niro plays the calm one and Pesci the psychopath. In Raging Bull, the relation is much the opposite, with Jake LaMotta as essentially a paranoid, narcissistic psychopath (he is a "raging bull") and Pesci as the slightly more level-headed brother. Truly, Raging Bull is an American Othello, with LaMotta constantly suspecting and punishing his Desdamona, played by an extremely young Cathy Moriarty. 

So, with all of these accolades, why do I dislike this movie?

It's complicated. The first time I watched this film was in the midst of my and my brother's obsession with Scorsese's Goodfellas, which you can read about on my "About Me" page. We were in love with anything even remotely associated with Scorsese and wanted to see Raging Bull as soon as we knew what it was. I still remember Burt and me watching it on an old TV in our living room and both of us feeling...confused by the end. I don't know what I expected, but I do remember feeling let down. Because I was only about 17 at the time, it is easy to dismiss my initial reaction to youthful ignorance. However, I've watched it since then several times and always carry that same feeling of...disappointment. After watching the film last night, I am finally able to articulate that disappointment. 

Jake LaMotta is a character consumed by violence; it defines every fiber of his being: his masculinity, his passions, his home life, his career, his treatment of his family. He is a man who is drowned in violence, defined by it, driven by it, aroused by it. As a result, every single scene of the film is at the very least tinged with this violence. Watching the film last night, I felt emotionally exhausted only thirty minutes into the movie, and it was then that I realized why. 

The film puts you inside the mind of a man--a "raging bull"--whose obsession with violence permeates everything about him, and it fills the audience with anxiety, fear, and trepidation. You have no idea whom he is about to attack, what he will break or destroy, or to what extent he will explode. He is a ticking time bomb in the most extreme. If you look at other Scorsese protagonists, this is not an unusual characteristic; in fact, it is quite common. Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Nicky in Casino, Tommy in Goodfellas--all of these guys are on the brink of explosion. For me, the difference is that LaMotta was not only a real person (this is a biopic, after all), but his anger and intensity feel so real. It is because of this constantly pulsing violence throughout the entire film that I believe Raging Bull is the most violent film Scorsese has ever done.

I can only speculate about how men feel watching Raging Bull, but for me as a woman, I feel anxious and tired the whole time. Although I have never been in a violent relationship, I have been on the receiving end of that kind of attitude LaMotta exudes: women as property, women as sexual objects, women as things. Indeed, every woman alive (and most girls) have been subjected to sexual harassment at some point (usually quite frequently), and the Jake LaMottas of the world are the ones we fear most of all. 

One scene in particular that made me feel queasy--in a way it did not when I was a teenager--was toward the end. LaMotta has a club and is quite fat and creepy at this point. He walks around the club kissing girls who may or may not be underage as a way to "test" and see if they are 21. I had to stop the film and walk around for a moment to calm down; De Niro's performance in that scene is so real, it provoked memories of every creepy, lecherous old man I've met at practically any social function: The ones who walk over to girls, sometimes still teenagers, and attempt to flirt by asking, "What's a pretty little girl like you doing here?" That familiarity and the underlying violence beneath it--sexual violence, violence that we as an audience know LaMotta is not afraid of using to get his own way, violence that threatens any woman who does not adhere to his idea of women as property--actually scared me; I say that without hyperbole. 

When we learn in a subsequent scene that one of the girls was only 14, and LaMotta is arrested, I had trouble sympathizing with him. In fact, I really have no sympathy for his character throughout the film, which I think compromises it. Although it is true almost Scorsese's entire filmography is about "bad people," I do not have trouble identifying or feeling interested in the protagonists of his other films, even the gangster pictures or The Wolf of Wall Street. Raging Bull, on the other hand, leaves me feeling nothing but revulsion and mercy when the final credits come. I don't really feel bad for him at all and struggle to empathize with anything that happens to him. 

One thing I would like to add is that over the years, critics have accused Scorsese of being misogynist, but I find that misguided at best. In Raging Bull, you are put inside the mind of a misogynist, and it is a creepy, unsettling place to be. The film, and almost all of Scorsese's movies, is an indictment of many of the things we associate with masculinity: violence, treating women like property, domination. There is nothing in this film indicating Scorsese endorses this behavior, but he forces you to experience it. I suppose this is one reason why I find this film so emotionally draining. 

All in all, Raging Bull is an exhausting, laborious movie to watch, but there is much to admire about it. I can see why people love it, and I do appreciate the many artistic elements of it; that doesn't mean I enjoy watching it. 

Grade: B+