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`Sunday' an Unforgettable Portrait of Melancholy By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic. The movie is called "Sunday," and that's when it takes place -- on one of those very quiet, nerve-racking weekend days when the lack of schedule or structure makes a strange void of the passing time. On this disorienting day, we see rooftops, hear a French ballad and then see a group of homeless men waking up and grousing over breakfast in a church shelter. Their talk is loud and raucous, like the soundtrack of a Fred Wiseman verite documentary. The point of view is odd and decentered. Later, somewhere else, two people cross paths on a street in the New York City borough of Queens. One of them, an unemployed actress named Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), thinks she recognizes the other, a famous motion picture director named Matthew Delacorta (David Suchet). She pins him down with bubbly, slightly panicky chatter. He responds warily, enigmatically. They have a bite to eat, go back to her shabbily genteel home. As they sip California chardonnay, Madeleine's husband, Ben (Larry Pine), a sneaky-looking guy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt, comes upstairs and starts nosing around and making mischief. Will Matthew give Madeleine a part? Will they sleep together? What's on Ben's mind? Slowly, carefully, we try to peek beneath the surface of the literate, nervous conversation. And fairly soon, writer-director Jonathan Nossiter makes his crucial connection. The man in Madeleine's room is not Matthew Delacorta, but Oliver -- a fired IBM technician, fallen on hard times, who lives in the very shelter we saw in the movie's opening sequence. He doesn't belong in her world. She doesn't belong in his. And everyone else, it seems, is almost equally adrift. "Sunday" -- which won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at the last Sundance Film Festival -- is a compassionate and intelligent drama about lost souls. Where most American movies try to seduce or pummel you into submission, this one approaches you tentatively, with open heart and fractured feelings, just like Madeleine and Matthew/Oliver. That unlikely pair is so well played by Harrow and Suchet, that the movie rivets you right from their opening conversation. Mining every nuance, catching every fleeting fear and doubt, Suchet and Harrow put on an amazing show. They make confusion dynamic, weakness fascinating, turn everyday fears into crackling theater. Suchet, a regular movie villain, is known to American PBS audiences as Agatha Christie's famously egocentric Belgian detective and infallible "little gray cell" juggler Hercule Poirot. But this role gives him a different challenge, one he conquers movingly. Oliver is a man at the end of his tether, trying desperately to hang onto his middle-class routines and rituals in the midst of the shelter. When he meets Madeleine and becomes Matthew, his standoffishness seems at first to come from wariness about where she's leading him. But, the revelation that he's really a homeless ex-businessman -- which comes early on -- changes the story's current. He reveals himself to Madeleine in a story about the shelter, which she seems to accept as a filmmaker's fancy. She tells a similar story, about picking up a strange man in the street and pretending to be confused about his identity -- which may be the truth or just her way of keeping the game going. And what becomes obvious as the day wears on and things get warmer, messier and more tangled, is that each of them is so alone and unhappy, that this kind of private mutually improvised theater is something that they need -- and something that sadistic Ben needs to destroy. American moviemakers are often impatient or nasty with losers. But not Nossiter. And not his co-scenarist James Lasdun, a British writer who transplanted one of his own short stories to Queens for the movie. Nossiter sees beauty not only in the predicament of Madeleine and Matthew but also in the plight of all the people in the shelter -- including the aggressive scatter-brain Ray (Jared Harris), the brash, obnoxious Jimmy Broadway and subway singer Chen Tsun Kit (played by themselves). Nossiter's style is fragmented and lyrical. One of the film's end-title credits reads "Continuity: Very little." The joke is Nossiter's wry recognition that he's breaking rules. Though the acting and writing are on a very high level, "Sunday" is a movie that's very much a matter of personal taste: vulnerable and full of feeling in ways we don't expect from our movies. The story's wistful, bleeding, funny/sad texture builds up an unforgettable portrait of melancholy, solitary city lives. And of what Sundays are like when the Mondays are empty, too. By Michael Bergeron Two very middle-aged people meet by chance and fuck each others brains out, and heads around, on any given Sunday in Sunday, a first feature from Jonathan Nossiter (whose previous film was the docu Resident Alien). It's an art film, and a very British art film at that. Though obviously low-budget, Sunday exudes a subtle charm based on its tight perspective of character and grand way of launching into probing soliloquies. Locations in and around Queens, New York, a slippery editing between connecting elements, and an almost verite look at the pedigree within a working homeless shelter add up to a challenging film. Sunday opens this Friday at the Landmark River Oaks Three. Fallen from grace in the corporate world, Matthew/Oliver hides out in a homeless shelter, finding solace in a can of Lysol aerosol that he uses to sanitize the sink every morning. Playing Matthew/Oliver is David Suchet, whom you may not know as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, but should recognize as the head terrorist in Executive Decision. Nossiter, who co-wrote, gives us a side view of Matthew/Oliver; at times rack focusing out-of-focus to give us Matthew/Oliver's subjective way of looking at the world. (He likes to take his glasses off a lot.) First we see him as frail, learning of his former middle class status later, after he's bumped into Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a slightly daft actress who mistakes him for a prominent director she met once. Matthew/Oliver whips off his glasses, things get blurry, and he assumes another identity. But Nossiter leads us to question whether it's him or Maddy who's choosing to play games. Harrow matches Suchet's drive in establishing doubts about her motives. Sunday eventually becomes an allegory for identity set among cafe diners under massive bridges. Another film where two members of Characters Anonymous get together and have mutually pleasing sex was John and Mary (Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow). At the end of the movie Hoffman says, "Oh, by the way, my name's John." Okay, this one doesn't end quite that way, but at the end of Sunday, the feeling's similar. It's not that Sunday's sex is so graphic -- it's that so few films (Paul Cox's A Woman's Tale) show anybody over 35 years or 165 pounds having doggone sex, much less walking around nude with their gut hangin' down, as do Harrow and Suchet. The key to Sunday is its longest scene, one where the principals tell each other a story. Naturally, Matthew/Oliver relates his hidden self, masking it as a director's idea for a movie. Maddy comes across with her own alienated piece of whimsy, propelled by her native Londoner status, in exile in Queens. Somewhere during that scene you'll know why these two people have chosen each other. In this romantic mystery, set in the improbably lyrical urbanscape of Queens, what seems to disappear is the characters' understanding of each others' identity..an appropriate feeling for one of the least known ambiences of New York. In fact, this tale of mistaken identity revolves around a series of mysterious HUMAN triangles. On a typical winter Sunday, Madeline, a struggling, middle aged English actress wakes up like an exile, a refugee in her modest house, already pushed across the river from Manhattan, even further from her native London. Her torturous separation from her American husband Ben is in a dangerous phase, with their adopted Korean daughter caught in the middle. Meanwhile, Oliver, an overweight former IBM technician, recently exiled from the middle class, has also woken up to an ongoing horror this Sunday morning: to his continuing disbelief, he's living in a homeless shelter. So, it's quite a surprise for these two strangers to find themselves linked together in a magical triangle, created by the phrase: "You're Matthew Delacorta, we met..." Part psychological whodunit, part modern "Brief Encounter", the film is grounded in Madeline's determination that in America anything is still possible, while Oliver is determined to believe that anything is better than his current lot. Woven in and out of the main story are the seemingly random and unconnected tales of Oliver's fellow homeless at the small shelter. Providing a subtle dramatic counterpoint to the main action, these quiet tales are integral to establishing a broader human landscape of both courage and desperation in exile. Despite the lies, plot twists, chance encounters and deceptions, they share a common goal. The struggle for all these "unsheltered" people, on this one random Sunday, becomes a kind of race against the clock to see if simple, redeeming human contact can be re-established. Madeline's anxious race to find through Matthew AND Oliver, a way to avoid falling back into a poisoned life; for Oliver his struggle is to find through Madeline a way of avoiding a further descent into the wilderness of internal American exile...but how long can they keep up the pretense of "Matthew Delacorta"? If a movie is weird, unique or refreshingly different, I will, to a certain extent, appreciate it. SUNDAY is all three. Exploring the very thin line between reality and fantasy or, in this case, the line between two different identities, is provocative, entertaining, and hypnotically absorbing, as well as being a challenging mystery. At first, SUNDAY seems straight-forward: a homeless man living in a shelter goes out for a walk. Then, things get a bit mysterious. The homeless man is mistaken for a famous film director, and he goes along with it. The case of mistaken identity gets worse: is the woman who mistakes Oliver for Matthew simply a lonely divorcee, or is she something else? And, who, or what, is Madeline's ex husband, Ben? SUNDAY successfully tickles the 'entertainment bone.' The film is beautifully shot in Queens, making the area look as desolate as the lives of the characters. The performances are all quite good. But the film leaves you that there are still many unanswered questions. In fact, by the end of the film, you know LESS than in the beginning. I think this is a good thing. Sunday a worthy example of indie filmmaking BY RUSSELL MULVEY The tedious inevitability of abject tragedy seeps through all recent American independent film like water through the basement of an otherwise fine old house. The home is still perfectly pleasant but the anticipated scent of mildew is beginning to make visits awkward and even unpleasant. Sunday is a an excellent example of recent American independent filmmaking. It has a sad ending. It has a sad beginning as well. The circumstances and characters introduced in the beginning clearly point the way to the sad ending. No surprises, in other words? Not quite. There is a great deal of craft involved in Sunday and in most recent American independent films because they are not, in any conventional sense, predictable. But since all these films are tragedies, that is they are all conventional narratives that deal with an individual's downfall, they have an inherent inevitability that makes them feel predictable. Sunday is a fine film directed by Jonathan Nossiter. It is, apparently, his first feature film. It's pretty damn good. He demonstrates a profound understanding of the way the camera links the character(s) and the story(ies), not so much forging links as drawing arrows in the snow that covers the seemingly borough of Queens, New York where the film takes place. Sunday, which is based on a story by James Lasum--who co-wrote the screenplay with Nossiter--won the Waldo Screenwriting Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the most recent Sundance Film Festival. The concerns of downsized, middle-aged, homeless Oliver are simple. He has to make it through another day. He once had a job, a wife, a home and, most importantly, things to occupy himself. He resents waking up in the men's shelter. He resents heading out into the street to kill time. When he is mistaken by an aging actress for a film director he plays along, not so much because he wants to get something out of the charade but because it gives him something to do. Sunday is not a love story but there are some romantic interludes between the two leads. Sunday is also not a political story though there is definitely a kind of Marxist idealism or maybe Protestant work ethic at work (no pun intended). Sunday is a tragedy of the sort that denies the worth or even the existence of hope and in its place offers a kind of existential demonstration--there but for (whatever) go I. |
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