Reviews

John's flik piks movie rewiews

This could have been an "A" with a more appropriate soundtrack (Armstrong, Holiday, Horne). Ironically it's the Sunday morning of the Academy Awards (Oscars) which airs tonight and I'm reviewing "Sunday" an excellent film in its own right. Frankly I don't think Sunday would be a candidate in the academy's condescending eyes if you know what I mean. Sunday is a human picture that is disturbing on many levels - as is being human sometimes - right from the opening credits I knew I was getting something refreshingly different. One sensed that the characters in the credits didn't really matter, they were difficult to see - and done quickly - possibly making the point they could be anonymous or even "us" for that matter. Sunday explores our societies tendency to establish a pecking order READ: how things should be. That is go to school, study hard, get a good job and raise a family -ideally heterosexually - and don't get old or sick either. However, when someone slips off the conveyor belt of capitalism, what then? Well, it's "Sunday" without flavored coffee and Jazz.

This film contains some of the best cinematography of 1998. Not an easy task when you're in the company of Saving Private Ryan and Life is Beautiful. Oh, and the super bonus prize is its not about war! If you want to melt into and be one with your couch this may not be the feel good film to rent. The metaphors and similes run rampant in the film as the homeless culture is portrayed simultaneously with a "broken" family. Whoa, wait, aren't most families in the U.S. "broken" according to Helms et. al.? Not unexpectedly the boundaries and discipline (good old family values) seem more existent in the homeless shelter than in the "family". On a deeper level is Suki (daughter) headed for trouble, or worse, the shelter secondary to her less than perfect upbringing? Just to wipe the slate clean didn't the family need more Lysol than the shelter dwellers? The broken wilted plant needed to be nursed and loved back to life by Lisa Harrow. Similarly she picks up the broken Suchet and temporarily has her way with him, then discards him. All the while keeping a greenhouse of her resurrected plants that don't talk back in her bedroom.

Some plants and people can be saved/healed but not on this "Sunday". It's no mistake that "Sunday" is rolled out at the end of this millennium. After all, we allegedly have a booming and robust economy replete with low unemployment and interest rates. So, what's the fuss all about? Well pals, unless you're an internet wizard web master in your nubile twenties you're at the imminent risk of being "canned", let go, fired, or the word du jour DOWNSIZED. Unlike our parents generation, loyalty to the company through good and bad means squat and could be actually construed as a negative trait in these corporate merger days. In other words, you're expendable after you've given your blood, sweat and tears to the company when you hit fifty years old, male or female. That's why most of us can identify with the director (AKA Suchet) in "Sunday" and how close one day we may be to him.

Grade: A-

Pretense and desire

Sundance winner 'Sunday' isn't afraid to be ugly

Anne Laker

For every Hollywood movie roaring with power, danger and sexual perfection, there is an independent film--quiet, ugly, unflinching--that usually goes unseen. Sunday is the kind of film that isn't afraid to aim its camera at the grimy toilet in a shelter for homeless men. Now that's ugly.

Watching Sunday is like penance for all those gruesome, unfeeling action films, all those cold thrillers and foamy romantic comedies you've digested. Sunday is not designed to melt in your mouth. It goes down like castor oil, heavy and thick. Which doesn't mean it's not to be seen.

The plot has pudgy Oliver struggling to sleep amid the din in a men's shelter in dreary Queens. We are forced into his perspective by sharing his blurred vision when he takes off his thick glasses and gropes for the Lysol can. Like him, we are immersed in the filth, the banter, the desperation of the shelter.

Then the men disband for the day--one to mop the floor at a burger joint, one to pilfer the junkyard, one to sing opera to a boombox in the subway station. Oliver wanders down the street and catches the eye of a woman carrying a potted palm. "Matthew? Matthew Delacorta? I thought that was you."

Thus begins a strange labyrinth of bizarre betrayal, failures of intimacy, pathetic posturing, some of it funny, all of it sad. The woman is an actress named Madeline who mistakes Oliver for a famous director she once met. How long will Oliver play along? Will Madeline still want him when she finds she no longer needs him?

Sunday is a movie about movies more than it is a movie about homelessness. When Madeline glibly asks "Matthew" to tell her a story, he tells her the story of the movie: a man meets a woman who mistakes him for someone he's not. The sweat forms on Suchet's upper lip as he plays this scene. Madeline, ever the actress, counters: woman meets pathetic man, pretends she thinks he's famous, lures him up to her apartment to make her husband jealous.

So director Jonathan Nossiter plays with our notions of drama, artifice, voyeurism. Throughout the movie he plants garishly colored food. Green cake, blue Jell-O, doughnuts with red frosting. He slices and dices the egos of actors by showing Madeline get excited by watching a guy watch her on TV, in a role where she plays an Elizabethan queen, complete with crown and ruff. This faked screen elegance contrasts with her disheveled dysfunctionality.

Tinged with humor and compelled by the viewer's predictable, pathetic wish for salvation and love, Sunday is complex and challenging. As the Grand Jury prize winner at this year's Sundance, it represents the best of the independents and their freedom to view the world from the most unsightly points of view. But it takes a serious film lover to dissect and process Sunday's bitter, bald look at pretense and desire.

Pick of the week

by Cathie Ehle

Sunday is a very gentle tale of deception. It deals with a deception that two middle-aged people choose to explore because of their unsatisfactory lives. What person, muddled in the daily grind of his or her life, wouldn't jump at the chance to be someone different, perhaps someone more exciting, for a day?
Oliver, a shy man who has been laid off from his job at IBM, lives in a homeless shelter in Queens, N.Y. To Oliver, everyday is like Sunday-no work, no hope for work. One morning, while wandering the city aimlessly he bumps into Madeleine, an actress, who mistakes him for Matthew Delacorta, a famous film director. Faced with the choice of admitting the truth and continuing his bleak Sunday or spending the day as Matthew Delacorta, Oliver chooses the latter.

The grace of this movie lies in the subtlety and frailness of these two characters. Madeleine discusses her displeasure of growing older and being forced to play only "mutant-zombie roles" that involve latex masks and heavy make up. The way she looks at herself in the mirror makes you feel like you are invading her privacy. Oliver (as Matthew) pretends he is talking about a character in a movie he is working on when, in actuality, he is talking about himself. With heartbreaking emotion, he describes how his out-of-work character feels whenever people ask him "What do you do?" meaning "Who are you?" The character is outraged while standing in the welfare line where people look at him like a bloodsucker.

In one striking scene, Oliver and Madeleine are shown completely nude. They both have bodies of the typical middle-aged person, which is something rare in the world of movies. This frail image lingers in the mind and is very humane, unlike a lot of nude scenes.

Shortly after they meet, Oliver and Madeleine admit to each other that they are clinging to the hope that someday something amazing will happen. This Sunday that amazing thing does happen: With some deception, they are finally able to express their true feelings about life. The sorrow and shyness of this movie will haunt you.

'Sunday' dawns oddly

And on the seventh day, they trysted. Two people knowing each other in the Biblical sense is about the only link between "Sunday" and Sunday services. The 95-minute movie directed and co-written by Jonathan Nossiter is a romantic-comedy of mistaken identity that works at many levels. It also can be initially impenetrable as confusions compound over just who the two principal characters are and who each thinks the other is. The film opens in a men's halfway house in New York City where Oliver is one of several bickering, posturing oddballs. Out on the street a short time later, a woman calls to him. Madeleine (Lisa Harrow) speaks shyly but knowingly, referring to him as Matthew Delalcorta, a film director she met in London. They chat in a coffee shop, then head to her place for some wine and an intimate encounter. But "Sunday" is not about sex and love, it's about intimacy and the need for it. When Madeleine seeks to up the ante on familiarity by asking him to tell a story, her newfound friend recounts what seems like a grim fairy tale: He describes the events leading up to their meeting. Waxing romantic if not poetic, Oliver tells of walking to church and having a beautiful woman mistake him for someone famous. Rather than swoon over the compliment, Madeleine offers an anecdote of her own. Her words dripping with scorn, she speaks of her encounter with "a pathetic little man" who is, of course, Oliver. Not exactly the foundation for the perfect marriage, but, then, Madeleine already has a husband. And he's not being treated much better, which explains why he delights in being the estranged husband. Madeleine grows as a character from the dippy, tentative mouse who first meets Oliver to a feisty femme fatale of sorts. "Sunday" has a strong and sardonic visual style that is riveting to watch. Intercut with the budding odd relationship between Oliver and Madeleine are scenes of one of Oliver's housemates panhandling by performing as a streetcorner tenor and other activities by those in the halfway house. This isn't a game these two people are playing. They're serious. Yet they are consciously or unconsciously constructing a fantasy in which together they can escape the doldrums and defeats of their individual lives. Is this then a fairy tale romance? Never on "Sunday."