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Cathy Thompson-Georges Sunday is a day of rest, generally the least eventful day of the week. Filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter, however, has constructed a Sunday of a very different stripe, one on which people collide in intriguing and unexpected ways. Sundays hold little significance for Olive (David Suchet); a former IBM employee left homeless by a layoff, he finds it just another day to kill until returning to the shelter where he sleeps. But when he crosses paths with Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a high-strung actress who is no longer young, she mistakes him for a famous director. Attracted to her and flattered, Oliver plays along; he becomes "Matthew Delacorta" and spends the day with her. Together, these two slightly off-kilter people develop a fantasy--or is it a folie a deux?--in which both can hope for career and personal redemption. But Madeleine's estranged husband (Larry Pine) and the other men who share Oliver's shelter present forces of reality that threaten to sour this fragile accord. One of "Sunday's" strengths is that the audience can never tell whether Madeleine and Oliver are doing something healthy or dangerous together; one is constantly unsure of what will happen next. Powerfully honest and risky performances from Suchet and Harrow propel the film, which provides as bleak a view of the streets and row houses of Queens as may be imagined. Writer/director Nossiter, in his debut feature film (he previously helmed the well-received documentary "Resident Aliens"), shows a deft touch with suspense, character and milieu. "Sunday" is a film filled with small pleasures: a lovely scene in a Greek Orthodox church; an exchange of stories between the leads in which truth takes on the power of fiction. Ultimately, this thought-provoking work adds up to a unique and memorable experience, one well worthy of the two awards it took at Sundance. Sundance winner checks into the homeless shelter BY TOM LYONS Homelessness, social scientists now realize, is a complex phenomenon whose evil effects are manifested in a number of different ways. Jobless men are forced to beg in the streets. Battered women are forced to seek refuge in temporary shelters. And well-meaning liberals are forced to suffer horrible, heartrending pangs of guilt after calling 911 to complain about the "really aggressive" panhandlers who pestered them as they tried to walk the two blocks from the Fight The Cutbacks! meeting to the sidestreet where their mini-van was parked. Sunday, Jonathan Nossiter's new film about homelessness and winner of the Best Film award at this year's Sundance Festival, is an interesting and watchable piece of work because it actually examines, rather than embodies, these sorts of hypocrisies The story focuses on Oliver, a fat, balding IBM worker who is forced to live in a seedy men's shelter in Queens, after losing his cushy job to corporate downsizing. He is despised by the other men, who sense, rightly, that Oliver is a cowardly, middle-class wimp who still thinks he is above them, even though he has sunk to their level economically and is miles below them in terms of things like toughness and resilience and good-natured humor. But rather than engaging in a simple-minded, sanctimonious attack on the middle classes, Nossiter also depicts the suit-out-of-water situation from Oliver's point of view. Seen through his eyes, many of the permanently homeless men seem vicious and predatory, and it is hard not to sympathize with a defenceless schmuck who suddenly finds himself in the midst of a Hobbesian world of low-level power struggles over everything from washroom rights to ownership of the shelter's only Lysol can. The notion of subjective class consciousness is explored still further when Oliver runs into a seemingly upper class actress (Lisa Harrow) during one of his aimless wanderings through Queens. She mistakes him for a famous movie director, and he plays along with the lie because he is too embarrassed to admit that he is an unemployed nobody. When she invites him into her home, however, it slowly becomes clear that she too is living a lie. Although her home is immaculately appointed, and her accent is impeccably upper-crust, her domestic life is actually in shambles. Her estranged husband lives in a seedy apartment in the basement of the house, and he repeatedly climbs the stairs to make bizarre, unpleasant scenes. Oliver and the actress, Madeline, confess their respective lies early on the movie, but each refuses to believe the other's admissions of deceit. The rest of the movie is spent following the odd couple, as they alternately try to maintain or dismantle their false fronts, and their strange interludes are crosscut with the various adventures of the other homeless men, as they spend the day trying to scrounge for money before coming together in a determined attempt to ostracize Oliver once and for all. But although the film's explorations of class hostility and hypocrisy are consistently interesting, Nossiter has decided to embellish his tale with a corny, over-obvious symbolism that is at odds with the otherwise realistic texture of the film. The actress is fond of adopting half-dead plants from gardening stores, and in case anyone in the back row missed the symbolism, Nossiter actually has her refer to the luckless Oliver himself as a half-dead plant in need of nurturing. The symbolism is enough to make you cringe, but fortunately it does not overwhelm the film. And though Sunday could certainly use a shot of humor now and then, at least it doesn't commit the sin of oversimplifying the intrinsically complex issues of poverty. Cody Clark Prim, handsome British actress Madeleine (Lisa Harrow) thinks homeless Oliver (David Suchet) is really Matthew Delacorta, the acclaimed art-film director, and she's heard Matthew Delacorta tells the most spellbinding stories. In the aftermath of a chance meeting on a street corner, they end up sharing a bottle of wine in Madeleine's living room, where she attempts to draw him out with light, chatty conversation. Oliver/Matthew doesn't have much to say, so at last Madeleine encourages him to share one of his peerless anecdotes. "Tell me a story," she purrs. "Spellbind me." Simple, unfettered storytelling is the whole agenda of Sunday, the debut film from writer-director Jonathan Nossiter--and for the most part, Nossiter's story is spellbinding indeed. Morning breaks over Queens as the opening credits roll, and the camera wanders through the streets of the city and ducks into a church-run shelter for homeless men. The shelter's inhabitants drag themselves out of bed and go about their workmanlike preparations for the day in a sequence so startlingly authentic it has the feel of a documentary. The last person up is paunchy, balding Oliver, who once upon a time was a married middle manager at IBM. His present life holds little meaning. He leaves the shelter to roam the city because he has nothing better to do, and when he is accosted by a lovely woman toting a large potted palm and speaking in a mesmerizing British lilt his astonishment nearly prevents him from answering her. Both characters cop to the reality of their situation--that Oliver is not, in fact, the heralded Delacorta, and that Madeleine doesn't truly believe he is--fairly early on, but their lives are so empty and spiritless that each yearns for the comforting self-reinvention this pleasant fantasy affords them, and they doggedly stick to it. Suchet (perhaps best known as television's Hercule Poirot) delivers a magnificent performance--he comes roaring to life when Oliver tells Madeleine that story--and British-TV vet Harrow is every inch his equal. Because the events of the film unfold within the framework of a single, magical day, the bare-bones plot hinges on the believability of their characterizations, and both performers deliver in spades. Sunday scored an impressive pair of accolades at this year's Sundance Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize as Best Dramatic Film and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, the festival's sole prize for writers. Given this impressive pedigree, it's a bit of a disappointment when the film runs out of steam in its final third. During these closing scenes, Suchet and Harrow are given precious little of the smart, searing dialogue that invests their earlier encounters with such undeniable energy, and shutting them up is a grave misjudgment. The other problem is the arrival, during the film's middle third, of Ben (Larry Pine), Madeleine's creepy husband. The screenplay never seems to know what to do with him, and his presence during the final frames is distracting and entirely unnecessary. These shortcomings are ultimately lamentable, but they are a small price to pay for the sheer pleasure of watching a film so imaginative and
engrossing. Raw 'Sunday' offers memorable moments by SHAWN LEVY Directed and co-written by Jonathan Nossiter, Sunday is a playfully cryptic slice-of-life movie with a taste for emotional confusion that recalls the work of the great John Cassavetes. Choppy, elliptical, impassioned and a tad perverse, it periodically stumbles into a sort of turgitude but just as frequently reaches some strange and compelling crescendos. Aptly enough, the action in Sunday all takes place in the course of a single Sunday in Queens, N.Y., -- although this isn't immediately clear given Nossiter's itchy editing style, which jumps through time, space and perspective with unnerving regularity. On this gray, wintry day, a man (David Suchet) wakes in some sort of homeless shelter and wanders the no man's land of the neighborhood. Aimless, he bumps into a woman (Lisa Harrow) who recognizes him as a filmmaker. She's an out-of-work actress, you see, and she invites him to a diner for a drink and then back to her ramshackle house, where they talk around and at one another. Soon enough, they make love. But nothing is as it seems. The woman has a husband and a daughter, it appears, and the man isn't a filmmaker at all. They've been thrown together by some kind of desperate existential impulse, and they're both a little too horrified by their neediness to come right out and say what they really want. |
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