In the 1981 film Reds, Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty star as American left-wing journalists Louise Bryant and John Reed, whose respective books Six Red Months in Russia and Ten Days That Shook the World were compiled from articles about the October Revolution. The movie follows their fraught relationship through infidelities, separations, and reconciliations.

In a key sequence, the married couple’s rekindled love is shown unfolding against a backdrop of revolutionary events in Russia. Reed addresses a crowd that burst into a euphoric rendition of “The Internationale” as Bryant gazes up at him with tear-stained cheeks. The rousing song continues as a montage sequence unfolds: the couple are seen in bed (a mercifully brief missionary position sex scene, coyly rose-tinged), red-banner-waving crowds advance through the streets of Petrograd, Trotsky gives a speech, Reed and Bryant animatedly discuss the newspapers, the Winter Palace is stormed and Reed strides its gilt-edged corridors, the couple cheer Lenin and steal an affectionate glance at one another. As the song reaches its climax (wink wink), we see the kissing lovers in silhouette; arising from their slumbers though not, it seems, changing all old traditions.

Slavoj Žižek has interpreted the cutting in this sequence as ludicrously literal in its symbolic association of sexual and historical content, but I’d rather read Elizabeth Hardwick, who noted that Reds presents Bryant and Reed’s relationship as “classic film romantic comedy — fighting and making up, husband sent to the sofa, husband in the blazing kitchen.” Žižek argues that the Hollywood movie montage’s interweaving of revolution and romance minimizes the gravity of the historical event, but by coating everything in cloying vanilla icing and by implying that Reed is the dominant partner, the scene also presents a bland and conventional vision of love, even if, as Hardwick points out, the protagonists’ political heroes may have had little interest in combining the two themes: “There is revolution and then there is also love. With the leaders in Russia, love stories are not often in the advance guard of experience.”