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By MATT WOLF Sunday is ``the day of nothingness,'' we are informed early in Jonathan Nossiter's ``Sunday.'' It's a measure of the rather forced nature of a self-conscious, if earnest, film that it marks the day that Oliver (David Suchet) and Madeleine (Lisa Harrow) begin to make something of their lives. The two meet one brisk wintry morning at an intersection in Queens, the New York City borough whose tourist board won't be overly pleased with its characterization here. (It's an ``un-place,'' full of ``un-people,'' states Madeleine.) Oliver is making his heavy-footed, doleful way down the street, the weight of life clear from his slow, wearisome gait. Madeleine, a down-on-her-luck English actress, is struggling cheerfully along with a large (and dying) plant when she mistakes Oliver for film director Matthew Delacorta, whose output includes something called ``Diversion.'' The two proceed to a diner - Madeleine requests a table for three to accommodate her plant - where she plies Oliver with an almond drink he doesn't particularly like, and soon they are back at her house making anxious love. The hitch: Madeleine is separated from Ben (Larry Pine), who has a knack for appearing when least expected, with their adopted daughter in tow. Ben is not above his own deceptions, weaving tales about his scarred chest that enable him to match Oliver lie-for-lie. The point, of course, is that Madeleine's beloved celebrity, Matthew, is nothing of the sort. She has to learn that he is the none-too-glamorous Oliver, a one-time IBM employee dropped from the middle classes into a life of homelessness from which he can find no exit. Nossiter's debut feature, acclaimed at this year's Sundance Film Festival and subsequently seen at the Cannes Film Festival, has something of the feel of early John Cassavetes (``Faces,'' etc.) in its depiction of life's discards struggling to deal themselves a better hand. And the shared gallantry of Suchet and Harrow - both veterans of English theater and television - lends conviction to an independent film that often seems like a claustrophobic theater exercise opened up for the screen. But working from a script by himself and James Lasdun, Nossiter makes fairly heavy weather out of a chance encounter that unfolds as ponderously as Oliver's weary step, finding surest footing in the bracing - and these days radical - suggestion that sexual desire does not belong solely to firm young flesh. Alarm bells go off not just at lines like ``doubt is the protoplasm of all real art.'' The film throughout is too dogged to bring to life that other New York that we all too rarely see. (It's no accident that the glittering spires of Manhattan appear in ``Sunday'' to be a world - not just a bridge - away.) Though Nossiter cuts repeatedly to the other men with whom Oliver is sharing a church-owned shelter, one feels the director scoring self-evident points rather than illuminating lives. ``No work, no hope for work, like every day's a Sunday,'' Oliver explains to Madeleine of his sad and aimless life. She, in turn, argues that ``the real me'' is back in England, implying that she's as half-dead as her plant. Such suffocating remarks dilute one's natural sympathies: by the time ``Sunday'' ends, you'll be wishing it were Monday. ``Sunday'' is a Cinepix Films release, directed by Jonathan Nossiter and written by Nossiter and James Lasdun; the producers are Nossiter and Alix Madigan. The film is unrated. Running time: 93 mostly dour minutes. There's no zest for the weary in dreary 'Sunday' By Joe Baltake It's a nondescript Sunday morning in Queens, N.Y., "a day of nothingness," as one of the characters puts it in Jonathan Nossiter's bleak, wintry "Sunday." It's a day for killing time until the work week begins again on Monday morning. But for the people in Nossiter's disquieting, cheerless movie, people with nowhere to go and nothing to do, every day is like Sunday. Take Oliver (David Suchet), for example. He's a downsized IBM accountant who has lost his wife, his home and his pride. On this particular morning, like every other morning, Oliver goes through his fastidious routine in the men's shelter where he sleeps - cleaning up the bathroom before he uses it, placing towels over certain areas to protect himself - while carefully avoiding the shelter's other denizens. Then he spends the day wandering around. Oliver is still stunned by the horror that his life has become. He walks around aimlessly in a state of disbelief. At one intersection, he hears a woman shout at him. "You're Matthew Dellacorta! The film director." The woman, who is carrying a half-dead plant, which comes to represent her life, is Madeleine Vesey (Lisa Harrow), a displaced British actress who transplanted herself to America where she married and, with her husband (Larry Pine), adopted a little Asian American girl. She also promptly lost her career, but not before she was relegated to appearing in horror movies. Oliver can't get a word in. Madeleine rushes him into one of Queens' funky diners where she buys him a meal and chatters on about how she almost worked with him and how much she admired his film, "Diversions." Oliver doesn't bother to correct Madeleine. It isn't every day that he gets a free meal, see, or the attention of an attractive woman. They go back to Madeleine's place and make love. They also tell each other stories about themselves which shrewdly keep the audience off-balance. Madeleine, who assumes the famous Matthew Dellacorta is in Queens scouting locations for his next movie, asks him what it's about. Oliver tells her that it's about ... a downsized IBM accountant who has lost his wife, his home and his pride and who goes through fastidious routines in the men's shelter where he sleeps before spending the day wandering around. The character is still stunned by the horror that his life has become. He walks around aimlessly in a state of disbelief until he meets this woman ... an actress. He turns the truth of his life into fiction, replete with Madeleine as a crucial part of it. It's a story we watch as he is telling it. And Madeleine thinks it's wonderful. Nossiter continues to suggest the idea of multiple realities when Madeleine tells her history: She feels lost in her new home, estranged from her husband, and to relieve the tedium, she likes to pick up strange men - and pretend that they're famous directors. At this point, you have to wonder if she's lying. Exactly what is the truth here? And could it be that Oliver really is Matthew Dellacorta, scouting movie locations in Queens? Perhaps Madeleine didn't make a mistake. Perhaps he is Dellacorta. The potential for deception, for emotional games, becomes increasingly apparent when Madeleine's husband, Ben, shows up and makes a case for Madeleine's mental instability. "Sunday," which won multiple awards at the last Sundance Film Festival, including best picture, is an arresting film, at once lyrical and gritty, that benefits from the sense of experience brought to it by its two stars. It isn't every day that we get a love story about middle-aged people, or one with sex scenes in which the bodies look used, not tightly muscular, smoothly pumped up and, well, unreal. But for all its worthy achievements, "Sunday" feels half-dead. Like that plant. The joylessness that permeates it never lets up. There's no surcease, no relief. The drama here, which could either be fantasy or reality, remains downbeat to the end. Chris Hewitt Chief among the movie's virtues is its depiction of life in a homeless shelter. The details -- how the men store their few possessions, the shabbily genteel way they dress -- feel convincingly right. As does David Suchet, playing a displaced New Yorker who lives there. Behavior-wise and accent-wise, Suchet is miles away from his most famous role as TV's "Hercule Poirot," but he makes his character a proud, mysterious figure. He's especially mysterious to a has-been actress (Lisa Harrow), who mistakes Suchet for a famous movie director. Their relationship, which takes surprising twists and turn, forms the core of the movie and, unfortunately, it's a hollow core. Although there are unexpected revelations about the characters, these revelations are strangely bloodless because the tone of "Sunday" is so emotionally disconnected. The movie raises a lot of compelling questions about what determines identity: Is it your name? What you do for a living? How you look? How you make other people feel? Trouble is, the movie doesn't shed much light on any of them. Sunday a remarkable psychological mystery HENRY SHEEHAN A remarkable combination of psychological mystery and realistic drama, Sunday pirouettes on a simple case of mistaken identity. That the case involves a homeless man -- or at least one reduced to living in a church-run group home -- and an actress unhappily ensconced in an unfashionable neighborhood and unhappy marriage, might lead you to believe that the movie is a sentimental drama. But while Sunday is among the more emotionally deft movies of the year, it has a much more ambitious agenda than pity in mind. Ultimately, you might say it's psycho-social, about how an assumed identity gives us more room for honest expression than the one we've developed through years of diminished hopes and disappointments. But even that explanation doesn't do justice to the movie's broad outlook. Take the movie's opening scene, a strangely lyrical montage of a half-dozen or so single men awakening one Sunday morning in a run-down, if clean, apartment where they all live. It's clear from the differences in the clash of ages, tempers and appearances that something other than friendliness has brought them together; indeed, there's a palpable edge of tension underlying their waking routines. Yet the way the winter morning light is caught in its soft illumination and the attention the men bring to their worn dignity suffuse this moment of scruffy realism with a more tender, even private, feeling. Aside from telling you that the movie is undoubtedly going to be about one of the apartment's residents, the scene also serves as a warning not to decide too quickly on our emotional responses to the material. For an immediate reaction clearly isn't going to be the last one. After a scene of the men leaving the apartment building for aimlessly selected destinations throughout this Queens neighborhood, we see a man in a suit walking down the street. A woman carrying a plant sees him, too, and goes to him and says, "You're Matthew Delacorta, aren't you?" As it turns out, she is Madeleine Vesey (Lisa Harrow), an English actress struggling to find work now that she's entered middle age. The man (David Suchet, TV's Hercule Poirot) replies he is, indeed, Delacorta, a well-known film director, and the two are off for a local diner and the beginning of an encounter that will proceed with one interruption throughout the day. It's clear, of course, from the beginning, that Matthew isn't Matthew, but a resident of the shelter, even though the opening montage never shows him there. But some shots in that sequence clearly were meant to be from the point of view of an apartment resident, and, since the camera would sometimes go out of focus for those shots, one who was near-sighted. When this man, whose real name is Oliver, first spies Madeleine, he takes off his glasses, and the movie repeats that out-of-focus gambit. Only in bits and pieces will director Jonathan Nossiter -- who co-wrote the screenplay with poet James Lasdun -- allow objective facts about Matthew-Oliver to emerge. What always comes first will be his perception of how other people perceive him, from his contentious apartment mates to this still beautiful woman who thinks he's someone he's never heard of. Only then will the movie flash back to a scene earlier in the day, presenting it in a way that will confirm or contradict a character's perception. As it turns out, there are a lot of perceptions to sort out. Madeleine invites Matthew-Oliver to her home, where, after she tells an ostensibly made-up story about her unhappy marriage, her husband, Ben (Larry Pine), turns up with their adopted daughter. More complicated social situations remain to be sorted out, both as Oliver goes around with Madeleine and as his apartment mates go about their pointless rounds, some of which involve complaints about Oliver. It's impossible to say what these events involve because, for example, early on Oliver explains who he is and how he ended up in his predicament. The movie gradually becomes a study in just what we are willing to settle for in terms of our identities, how it is easier to be what we appear to be, but that in the end, we pay an awfully large price for that meager settlement. It would be nice to say that Sunday sums all this up elegantly at its end, but it doesn't. As eloquent and explicit as it has been throughout, at the end, it becomes more evasive. But if that's a disappointment, it comes at the end of many pleasures, including the superb performances of Suchet and Harrow. Through their characters, these actors show us that for something to be tattered, it had to fine to begin with. |
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