London. Autumn 1970. Human resources counsellor Alex Greville (mid-30s) negotiates London traffic en route to the home of Alva and Bill Hodson, where she and her boyfriend Bob (mid-20s) have agreed to look after the couple's four children while the Hodsons and Professor Johns vacate for the weekend. On the car radio, and throughout the film, news of an economic crisis, rising unemployment, job losses, restrictions on loans ... but Alex doesn't care; all she wants is Bob.
Bob (mid-20s, above) is an artist who makes sculptural fountains. These are not splashy, expressive fountains, but those whose coloured water is organized vertically in narrow plastic tubes that is pumped up and down like the notes of a Bach fugue -- not unlike Bob himself, who, in contrast, sees himself as wilder, less predictable, as evidenced by a lifestyle that has him also seeing Daniel (early-40s), a middle-class Jewish homosexual who has a successful medical practice and who is aware and grudgingly consenting of Bob's relationship with Alex, as Alex is of Bob's relationship with Daniel.
Sunday Bloody Sunday was written by London-born Penelope Gilliatt, a novelist and short fiction writer best-known as the late-spring to early-fall film critic at the New Yorker between 1967 and 1979 (the late-fall to early-spring film critic was Pauline Kael). Gilliatt was fired from the New Yorker by the man who hired both her and Kael, William Shawn, after it was found that she had plagiarized parts of Michael Meshaw's Nation magazine profile on Graham Greene for her own profile on a Greene, a profile that Greene denounced as "inaccurate," its author someone who has a "rather wild imagination."
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