The key to this excellent film is the music, the repeated melodies of Cosi fan tutti (1790), an operatic comedy by Wolfgang Mozart. The phrase translates into English as “They are all like that,” or “Thus do they all.” A literal translation of the phrase into English would be “so does all.” The opera is about an older man showing two young men that their girlfriends are unfaithful to them and then telling them that all women are like that. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the opera was considered to be highly vulgar and immoral. Some modern viewers would consider it to be misogynistic.
The lovers in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) are a divorced woman in her thirties (Glenda Jackson), an older Jewish homosexual physician (Peter Finch), and Bob (Murray Head), the handsome, shallow, and totally vapid bisexual young man with whom they both have sex. All three are aware of the others but the physician and the divorcee have never met. They each pretend not to care about the other lover. Everything is kept on the surface, there is no depth to the relationships. The film critic, Roger Ebert, called the situation “psychic amputation.”
The Bloody Sunday reference comes from the fact that on Sunday Bob is leaving for New York City in America to promote his meaningless invention, which will almost certainly be a commercial failure. He is not involved enough with either lover to stay. He would rather pursue a wild and useless whim.
She “loves” Bob and would rather share him than lose him. He “loves” Bob and would rather share him than lose him. Bob does not love, he is too shallow for a real emotion. He simply does not even care. To quote Roger Ebert again, “This is not a movie about the loss of love, but about its absence.”
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