John Schlesinger (Darling, Midnight Cowboy) was never an auteur à la française: much too transparent, much too uninvolved and dull in his transitions from the individual (intimate dramas) to the collective (social injustice) and vice-versa – there are only some of the bad positive lessons of British kitchen sink dramas, a movement that was still encouraged to embrace the new realities of urban, middle-class youth by Schlesinger through his significant contributions: connected, yéyé, never lacking in vices, pretensions and boredom. But, for the moment, I cannot think of any other title in British cinema except his 1971 directorial effort, Sunday Bloody Sunday, which has the power to evoke the sparks of tortured, sentimentalist films that are consumed for the sake of absolute love, the kind at which French filmmakers excelled at around the same period of time. Of course, if one is to compare it with the emotional intensities that were practiced across the Channel, Sunday Bloody Sunday will certainly seem clinical, animated – or, rather, extinguished – by a neutral and profane tone, which serves perfectly at tying the floating manners of the heart to the cold ground. And the British term „affair”, with all of its prosaic connotations, has never seemed more suitable than to describe this individual that is torn between two relationships – one with an upper-class woman; the other, with a reputable doctor – which he aptly and phlegmatically negotiates, without the fear of having shed his skin along the way.

Victor Morozov

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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

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