Ryan's Daughter / Дочь Райана (1970)

A contradiction of Ryan’s Daughter is that, in spite of the sheer expansiveness of its style and production, it’s an often painfully intimate tale. The film’s antiheroic romanticism is nailed solidly together by two rigid spikes: one, a bolt of irony that borders on cruelty as the characters’ fantasies seem to be fulfilled only to be snatched away to leave them squalidly floundering, and the other, a steely insistence upon moral backbone. David Lean’s penultimate film, the calamitous reception of which drove him from the cinema screen for more than a decade, nonetheless carries the flavour of a crucially personal piece of work—more personal, indeed, than the mighty but disjointed Doctor Zhivago (1965), his big previous success.