Reviews 

• Jonathan Nossiter's brilliant "Sunday" illuminates the mystery of life on earth 

• Movie Review By Andrea Chase 

• From Chicago Sun-Times

• Queen's Logic

Jonathan Nossiter's brilliant "Sunday" illuminates the mystery of life on earth

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR 

AT THEIR BEST, the movies are more than a meticulous recording of drama or, for that matter, a thrilling roller coaster ride. But in the constrained world of contemporary cinema, we are too often asked to choose between these supposed opposites, between the studied earnestness of "serious" filmmaking and the exhausted, exhausting formulas of Hollywood's boom 'n' chuckle factory. In recent years a third wheel has been added to the chariot, with the widespread adoption of a self-aware, artificial style that can sometimes produce brilliantly imaginative pastiches of the two earlier modes (see Tarantino, Coen, et al.) but has nothing whatsoever to say about the world outside the movie house (see Tarantino, Coen, et al.). Against this background, Jonathan Nossiter's resolutely unsplashy "Sunday" (co-written with James Lasdun, based on the latter's short story) appears almost like one of those amazing capital letters in a medieval illuminated manuscript, the product of obscure, ascetic craftsmanship, lit from within by mysterious holy fire. Based on this work, Nossiter seems to be one of those filmmakers -- rare in any generation -- who appreciates that drama and painting are the equal godparents to film, and understands that a movie can carry both moral import and a sense of the fundamental strangeness and otherness of life on Earth. Nossiter's courage is clearly demonstrated in the first several minutes of "Sunday," when we literally don't know what is happening, where we are or who we are supposed to follow. It is dawn on a freezing Sunday in a decrepit dormitory institution somewhere in New York City, and a diverse group of men is waking up. They grumble, curse, tell jokes, piss and eat breakfast, all without the scene organizing itself around a coherent center or yielding much in the way of expository information. Only much later in the film can we put it all together: The house is a church-run homeless shelter, and one of the men is Oliver, a downsized IBM accountant (David Suchet, best known as TV's Hercule Poirot), whose myopic point of view the camera intermittently adopts. This is more than an arid, experimental style; in many ways, "Sunday" is a lesson in perspective, a study of the thesis that what we pay attention to is at least as important as what we see. Nossiter's wandering but thoroughly distinctive eye has a way of isolating the strange within the ordinary: the bubbling struggles of the crabs and lobsters in a restaurant tank; a worker at White Castle spacing out and staring into the middle distance. While Oliver, a defrocked member of the middle class, is our focal point, we also witness fragments of how the other men from the shelter spend their day, delivered without a hint of judgment or commentary. One tries to pry open an old chest found in a junkyard; another sings karaoke Verdi on a Times Square subway platform; a third shivers on a highway overpass, feverishly writing in Arabic; a fourth not-so-covertly masturbates on a park bench. As the paunchy, balding Oliver begins to lumber through his "day of nothingness" on the streets of Queens, he is approached by Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a middle-aged English actress carrying an enormous, half-dead potted plant. Madeleine mistakes him for a film director named Matthew she met years ago, and in an uncharacteristic spasm of bravado, Oliver decides to play along and go where the day takes him. At least that's what seems to happen. Although plot, in the narrow sense, is not a central concern of "Sunday," it's best if I don't go much further. Suffice it to say that Madeleine seems increasingly interested in the shared symbolic fiction the two create together over the course of Sunday afternoon, and increasingly willing to overlook the evidence that Oliver is not in fact the filmmaker who once told her that "doubt is the protoplasm of all real art." Suchet plays the ponderous Oliver with tremendous discretion; he seems to be a man in shock, whose emotional insides have been carved out by the calamitous collapse of his life. But it is Harrow who performs an alchemical, fearless tour de force, making Madeleine simultaneously a daffy lady with scrambled egg stuck in her teeth and a powerfully erotic presence. At one moment she'll seem to be as pathetic a figure as Oliver, protesting that the "real" Madeleine went happily home to London years ago, leaving behind an "unperson" in the "unplace" called Queens. (The Chamber of Commerce in New York's largest borough won't find much to like in this film.) At the next, she'll appear to be a voracious sexual predator, a sort of female Bluebeard wielding a lethal pair of pruning shears. Nossiter does such an admirable job of enmeshing us and his two principals (along with Madeleine's estranged husband, played by Larry Pine) in their strange fairy-tale afternoon that his half-assed resolution of their situation, although plausible enough, comes as a grave letdown. Like so many movies, "Sunday" just sort of peters out, rather than finding an actual ending. At least we have reason to hope that this filmmaker, so clearly endowed with tremendous imaginative power and sophisticated human sympathy, will learn that art does not have to disappoint simply to emulate life, which so often does. 

Movie Review By Andrea Chase 

The way the film "Sunday" begins, you might be tempted to think that things couldn't possibly get worse for Oliver as he wakes up to another day living in a Queens new York homeless shelter. You'd be sadly mistaken. 

The film begins by painstakingly tracing the bleakness of his morning routine, and his complete inability to cope with either the environment or the other inhabitants of the shelter. Fortunately for him, and for us, the rules of the house force him onto the streets from just after breakfast until the 10 PM curfew. He wanders aimlessly until a woman carrying an oversized philodendron hails him from across a deserted street. Well, not him, exactly, but a famous film director for whom she's mistaken him. Before he has a chance to convince himself that he ought to set this lovely warm woman straight, she's whisked him to a diner and then to her home. And here the fun begins. Is she mistaken, or is she perfectly aware that the befuddled shlub sitting in her living room is a perfect stranger? And if so, are her motives less that pure in luring him hither? 

David Suchet, best known for playing Hercule Poirot, takes a 180-degree turn with Oliver, a sad little man for whom life has been thrown permanently out of kilter. As his serendipitous paramour, or is it nemesis, Lisa Harrow is alternately creepy and charming yet always completely believable as she makes hairpin turns from one persona to another. 

The story abounds in uncertainty. Who's really who and what? There's also an element of danger thrown in. The danger, though, is presented as fascinating as well as threatening. The relentless bleakness of these characters' lives makes danger a welcome alternative to their daily round of boredom and despair. Even tender moments have a nervous edge to them. 

As for "Sunday's" ending, some may find it infuriating. It's odd and yet, given the build up, completely consistent. Like it or hate it, though, you will be thinking about it long after the final credits roll. 

SUNDAY

BY ROGER EBERT 
Chicago Sun-Times

`Sunday'' opens like a documentary, watching the residents of a halfway house get up for the day, shave, dress, pour coffee and continue what seem to be eternal arguments about what is or isn't ``community property.'' Then it cuts outside, to the wintry gray streets of Queens, and what appears to be a large green plant walking down the street. The plant is in the arms of a woman who spots a man, walks up to him, and calls him Matthew Delacorta. He is, she says, the famous movie director, who she met in London. 

He is not. He is Oliver (David Suchet), a middle-aged man who lives in the shelter, where he is generally disliked, and spends his days wandering the streets. But he is so astonished to be addressed in this way that he goes along with the misunderstanding, pretending to be the director. The woman's name is Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), and she is a British actress, once a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, but now reduced, she confesses, to playing ``mutant zombies.'' 

They talk. Their talk will occupy most of the movie--the best parts, certainly--as they sit in a diner, drink wine at her nearby home, and eventually have sex. But ``Sunday'' is not a romance, and they are not flirting but crying for help, for companionship, for another voice against the loneliness. 

``Sunday'' won the screenwriting award at the 1997 Sundance Festival (it also won the Grand Jury Prize), and its writing, by James Lasdun and the director, Jonathan Nossiter, is its best quality. It is about two people who were once good at what they did, who were ``downsized'' in one way or another, and who now feel stranded and worthless. ``When they ask what do you do,'' he says, ``they mean, who are you?'' He eventually tells her who he was once, and what he is now.

She had a crisis in her career--a loss of voice, or perhaps a loss of the will to speak onstage--and notes that her agent mostly sends her horror roles: ``I guess I'm too old to play a human being.'' Oliver could, in a way, make the same statement. 

The movie plays a subtle game with the information they share with one another. ``Tell me one of your stories,'' she says, over a glass of wine, and he tells her the literal story of this day in his life, which we have already glimpsed as it began in the shelter. It is the truth. Does she accept it as the truth, or continue to deceive herself that he is Matthew Delacorta? 

We have to decide as the movie continues; some moments we would answer one way, some moments another. It's intriguing, how they play games with their dialogue; at times it's like a conversation with an artificial intelligence program, especially when the ``director'' uses her questions to inspire his answers--not so much confirming that he's Delacorta as letting her assert it. 

One of the things the movie accepts without apology or question is the substantial flesh of these two middle-age people. Suchet (who plays Hercule Poirot on PBS' ``Mystery!'') has a potbelly, and Harrow (unforgettable in Gillian Armstrong's ``The Last Days of Chez Nous'') has a tummy, smaller but definite. In one scene she lies on a bed, frankly revealing herself to his gaze, looking like a model for a Francis Bacon portrait--but Madeleine isn't ugly, as Bacon's subjects were made to seem; she is lovely, and more at home in her body than in her life. 

The film takes this strong, simple material and surrounds it with a little too much artiness. There are cutaway shots to the dismal streets, shots of a fellow resident of the shelter singing for coins in the subway, and flashbacks to Oliver's daily routine. When Madeleine's husband and adopted daughter return home, there are hints that all is not right in their house--hints that add an unnecessary subtext. 

But the heart of the film is strong. It is about two people who would rather build and share a fantasy together than do whatever else would have occupied them on this empty Sunday. ``The hardest thing is having nothing to do,'' Oliver says about unemployment. ``Every day is Sunday.'' 

Queen's Logic 

Peter Bowen on Jonathan Nossiter's Sunday

Long before the rigors of late capitalism created the need for the weekend to disarm the psychological tensions of the work week, there was Sunday. Religiously sanctioned and socially necessary, Sunday was at once a day of devotional reflection and a period of dramatic reinvention during which social and economic structures were, if not changed, then creatively re-figured.

The inherent drama of the seventh day can be found in works as different as "Sunday in the Park", Georges Serault's pointillist tableau of social disarray, or Weekend, Godard's epic of social disintegration. More recently, Jonathan Nossiter's Sunday, the surprise Grand Jury Prize winner in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance this year, captures with the stark palette of social realism the poetic, even magical, powers of this day. The film's tightly plotted narrative follows with irrational persistence the logic of mistakenidentity. One wintry Sunday morning in Queens, Oliver (David Suchet) leaves the homeless shelter to which IBM downsizing has exiled him only to be approached by a strange woman uttering, "You're Matthew Delacorta, the film director." More an incantation than an introduction, this phrase unleashes an improvisational fantasy to which both Oliver and the woman, Madeline (Lisa Harrow), a self-exiled, middle-aged English actress, at first tentatively and then tenaciously cling. During the ensuing day and endless evening, Oliver is continually introduced (as the celebrated Delacorta) to the dysfunctional fragments that make up Madeline's world: her dangerously deranged husband, their adopted Korean daughter, their blissfully indifferent neighbors. And like a rag-tag Greek chorus, the other residents of Oliver's shelter follow and observe at a distance the actions of these accidental lovers.

Nossiter's inspiration for this story came from a short story by the English writer and poet James Lasdun. While Lasdun's original tale incorporated the same plot device of mistaken identity, its characters (a theater director and older woman) and setting (London) were different. According to Nossiter, "James was quite flattered and enthusiastic at the proposal [of turning his story into a film]. So I sent him my notes, and he visited me, but the first thing he said when he entered the room was, 'I think your ideas are very stupid'." The two then agreed to start from scratch, and the ensuing collaboration was, for Nossiter, "far and away the richest I have ever experienced. Our different sensibilities and experiences coalesced in a way to create something more powerful than we would have alone." As for many in independent film, collaboration defines the pair's work ethic. In interviews, Nossiter is quick to credit not only Lasdun, but all members of his production team for their efforts and expertise. Not by accident then, the collaboration necessary to produce the film parallels the efforts of the film's characters themselves. What makes these otherwise mundane characters poignant and real is the imagination they exhibit to sustain and enlarge their joint fantasy of mistaken identity. One level plotless, since there is no event other than sunset that can conclude the story, the film's narrative depends on the pair's tacit agreement not to betray the theatricality of their relationship. "Like the effort in making a film," says Nossiter, "their effort is the struggle you go through to make some human contact, both in life and in fiction."

To a even larger extent the character's willful suspension of disbelief sets the tone for the film's psychological landscape as its time and locale are both real and symbolic. While ostensibly taking place during one Sunday, the film's changing weather, from sunny afternoons to snow covered freeway passes, suggests a Sunday that is as eternal as it is specific. (Ironically, this poetic gesture was born out of the low-budget necessity to shoot over extended periods of time.) Even the film's sense of duration, a twilight that refuses to give up its last light, echoes the characters' reluctance to let reality (and the ensuing work week) encroach on their self-created relationship. This sense of time, according to Nossiter, "is even more powerful for someone who is homeless, someone who has nothing to wake up to." Even as Oliver misses the shelter's deadline to return, the film makes brutally clear that being homeless is as much about the absence of schedule as it is shelter.

For Nossiter, the location of Queens is perhaps as culturally significant as his chosen day of the week. Nossiter posits in his dramatic cutaways the eerie complacency of the neighborhood, a place, "where people sit on stoops endlessly looking out at the world." For Nossiter, Queens embodies both America and the idea of America: "it is on the edge of America and New York, a land of immigrants, and yet a place in which all of America comes together. Everyone here is from some place else. Madeline is an English actress. Oliver is an emigre from the middle class. Yet everyone here is dreaming of someplace else." 

In the end, this contradictory sense of hope and despair makes Sunday unique, especially among so many recent personal films. According to Nossiter, "I have no desire to make a film about myself. I have to live with my problems, and they bore the hell out of me." And yet there is something uncannily familiar about the film's premise of mistaken identity. Nossiter had wanted the opening montage of the film to suggest that "this story could have been about any of the characters, that the same mistake could have just as easily revealed their lives." And why not? Who among us has not gone out for a Sunday walk and heard a voice asking if we were, for lack of better name, "Matthew Delacorta?"