Savage Messiah (1972) review

Manic French painter/sculptor Henri Gaudier (Scott Antony) has a chance encounter with depressive Polish "novelist" Sophie Brzeska (Dorothy Tutin) inside a library, he becomes infatuated with her even though she's significantly older than him and they take each other's surnames despite never marrying - eventually Sophie leaves, Henri uses women's rights activist Gosh Boyle (Helen Mirren) as his new model, Sophie returns, they become joyously reunited ... and then he goes off to serve in World War I and is killed in trench warfare.  Granted the viewer can look past Antony's repeated outbursts (in which he crawls on top of statues and bounces around on furniture like Tigger) - which is typical of Russell's ravenous "aesthetic" - underneath all that there is a sweet (and true) story about two freakish outcasts who succeed in finding their soulmate ... albeit in a perverse manner: Sophie detests sexual intercourse, provides Henri with money for prostitutes and they frequently refer to one another as "siblings" (which makes their "union" symbolically incestuous).  To counteract the sadness of the loss of a talented artist at 23 years of age, it wisely concludes with images of several of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures ... but a truly wonderful work of art is shown much earlier in the form of Mirren posing without clothing: if you got it, flaunt it.