This is actually a film of understatements. The feelings and emotions are unbearably great and are never given any vent, but like a sleeping volcano they keep boiling underneath demanding a release sooner or later. The question is whether they are ever released. When Glenda Jackson finally asks Alan Bates' wife and doctor and sister to just let him be in his second childhood happiness, she is asking for the impossible and is well aware of it, and yet, we see nothing of the results of it. The meetings between her and Alan Bates are the most crucial and important scenes in the film, and yet we are kept out of their intimacy, and they both deny any existence of it. "How was your meeting?" after not having seen each other for twenty years, his wife Julie Christie asks, and he just answers, "We just talked," as of something trivial. But this constant chain of understatements are actually the strength and force of the film, communicating so much more than just the real action, and when Alan Bates finally is released from his happy ignorance, we never even get a glimpse of any consequence of it. We just have to guess and figure out how their lives would continue, probably returning completely to ordinary routines. Ann-Margret is surprisingly good as the sister, and the finest scene is perhaps when she and Glenda Jackson finally find and understand each other in mutual trust - in silence. It's a great film of an inextricable problem of mentality after too many shocks, both of the war and of personal tragedies, and doctor Anderson (Ian Holm) actually sums its all up when he says, "ignoring and forgetting pain does not cure it", a wound has to bleed in order to heal.
Review of The Return of the Soldier
