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By Jeff Vice Some movies make you want to laugh. Some make you want to cry. Others still make you want to take a shower afterwards. Lump "Sunday" into the latter category. The Grand Jury Award winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, this weird drama/mystery is so seedy and so creepy it may leave a bad aftertaste in the mouths of some audiences. Also, the film's characters aren't exactly the most sympathetic ones you're likely to run across. Nonetheless, the film still succeeds on the strength of its two leads, David Suchet and Lisa Harrow, as well as the fact that director Jonathan Nossiter succeeds in making us care - to some small extent, admittedly - about what happens to them. "Sunday" starts off oddly, following Oliver (Suchet), a downsized tax accountant as he wakes up in a homeless shelter in Queens, N.Y. While taking a Sunday morning stroll, he encounters Madeleine Vesey (Harrow), an unemployed actress who mistakes him for Matthew Delacorta, a famous film director she once worked with. Capitalizing on the mistake, Oliver lets Madeleine take him to lunch. However, by doing so, he gets dragged into her strange existence. After accompanying her back to her townhouse, Oliver attempts to tell her the truth, but she won't have any of it. Perhaps flattered by her attention, he makes a fumbling attempt to woo her, and as she cleans up, he meets Madeleine's volatile ex-husband, Ben (Larry Pine), who tells Oliver that he's not the first homeless man Madeleine has brought back to her home. Though he storms out of the house in a huff, Oliver eventually returns under the guise of retrieving his jacket, and he and Madeleine proceed to get much, much more intimate. In addition to the strange main storyline, Nossiter peppers his film with intriguing glimpses at some of the shelter's other residents, including Ray (Jared Harris), who has taken an instant disliking to Oliver, and another man who performs karaoke-styled operas in subway train stations. Nossiter also effectively conveys a feeling of foreboding and dread before each of the film's confrontational scenes, although some of his technical aspects are lacking (such as continuity problems with the outside weather conditions in certain shots). The English-born Suchet, who plays Hercule Poirot on the PBS "Mystery" series, perfects his New York accent and ultimately makes Oliver seem somewhat sympathetic - despite the shocking revelation at the film's end. "Sunday" is not rated but would receive at least an R for abundant profanity, sex, full-frontal nudity, some vulgar references and scenes and a few scattered racial epithets. Rebecca Yeldham for Sundance Channel A forceful tale of illusive passion, Sunday chronicles one radiant day in the lives of two middle-aged people weighed down by the misery of their existence. Jonathan Nossiter has shaped a work suffused with subtlety, emotion, and a profound sorrow. Bittersweet and not shy of sentiment, Sunday mines the intricate relationship between desire and identity, reality and invention. Having enjoyed and lost a middle-class family and middle-management livelihood, Oliver has spiraled into destitution and landed at a homeless shelter for men. A struggling British actress in the midst of separating from her American husband, Madeline has spent the better part of the last twenty years begrudging her failures and the torturous banality of her existence. On a cold and cheerless Sunday deep in the heart of Queens, Oliver and Madeline meet. Mistaking him for the acclaimed art-film director, Matthew Delacorta, Madeline throws herself at the unsuspecting Oliver. Unaccustomed to friendly advances, particularly from a beautiful woman, the overweight and unkempt Oliver leaps at the prospect of reinventing himself, if only for one day. With an aching desperation and only a tenuous grip on reality, the "director" and his muse submerge themselves in one another, savoring their brittle fantasy as if it is a life-support system. Through their tender game of make believe, Oliver and Madeline live their Sunday as if it is the last day on earth -- as if only in each other can they find a glimmer of hope and perhaps redemption. At once gritty and lyrical, Sunday is a profoundly humane account of the frailty of human spirits strangled by life's bitter ironies. With stellar performances by David Suchet (Oliver) and Lisa Harrow (Madeline) and sharp writing by Nossiter and James Lasdun, the memory of Sunday lingers hauntingly. Rattling around, homeless on a bleak "Sunday' By JOANNA CONNORS Sunday is the cruelest day. Or it was, at least, before the arrival of 24-hour shopping and 95-channel TV, and the subsequent departure of the idea that on the seventh day, you rest. Remember how Sunday used to be? It stretched out forever. Nobody did anything, nothing happened, it was dead, dead, dead! You couldn't wait for it to be over, but then again you didn't want it to be over, either, because that meant . . . Monday. The old Sunday, the day of dust motes and ticking clocks, provides both the time frame and the tone for Jonathan Nossiter's "Sunday," a bleak but extraordinary movie opening today at the Landmark Centrum. What's extraordinary about it? Besides the Sundance Film Festival awards, the zero body count and the total absence of military hardware, you mean? Just this: "Sunday" wants us to see, really see, the sorts of people that our American advertising culture considers invisible - the middle-aged, the desperate, the downsized, the pot-bellied, the crow's-feet-marked, the ordinary. As you might expect, given its Sundance ties, this movie does not have a lot in common with the kind of movie that casts Michelle Pfeiffer as an "ordinary" Iowa farm woman. No. For its comrades, "Sunday" seems to have looked to a couple of old outlaws - playwright Harold Pinter and the late director John Cassavetes. Like Cassavetes' films, it is willfully deglamorized, deliberately messy, emotionally chaotic, spontaneous. Like Pinter's plays, it is sly and secretive, mordantly funny, and not a little confusing. If you pay attention for its short 93 minutes, though, you'll see more nakedness exposed than in "Showgirls" and "Striptease" combined. (You will also see naked bodies exposed, and - talk about extraordinary! - they actually look like something you might see in real life.) Nossiter starts us off at dawn on a midwinter Sunday, in a men's shelter in a rundown Queens church. Here, surely, is the purgatory that paves the way to hell. The film then heads right into a fresh hell, a bilious parody of Sunday family breakfast, with the camera literally stumbling among the dozen or so residents as they get out of bed and gather in the kitchen to bicker, complain, scratch, smoke, eat sticky pastry and tell bigoted jokes. Not until the men have emerged into the gray morning, grumbling as they head off to somehow fill this long "day of nothingness," does the film settle on a hero: Oliver (David Suchet, the Hercule Poirot of "Mystery!"), a dough-faced loner who wears his defeat like a thrift-shop overcoat. He was, we discover later in the movie, a tax accountant for IBM, pre-"downsizing." When he lost his job, he also lost his wife, his home, his very identity. "People ask, "What do you do?' " he says bitterly. "What they mean is, "Who are you?' " Who is Oliver? A woman who sees him on the street is certain he's the famous film director Matthew Delacorta, whom she met years ago at a party in London. She herself is an actress - a down-on-her-luck actress - and as she chatters on a bit too brightly about the party and about Matthew's various films, Oliver goes along with her mistake. All day, he plays the role of Matthew Delacorta, letting the actress, Madeleine (the excellent Lisa Harrow) lead him into a fairy-tale forest of dangers - sex, love, understanding, and vulnerability, not to mention fear when her estranged, and very strange, husband turns up. As "Sunday" occupies itself with the question of identity and roleplaying, art and artifice, it never loses sight of the other men from the shelter. It returns to them, again and again, while they make their way through the dreaded day. One man sings opera in the Times Square subway station. Another one tries all day to force open a locked trunk in a junkyard. Another sits huddled under an umbrella in the falling snow. Nossiter and his co-writer, James Lasdun, spent a lot of time in a New York homeless shelter as they prepared the script, and their work proves that God is indeed in the details. The movie's keen observation of the waylaid lives and grimy circumstances of these men gives it a documentary feel. That bleak sense of reality, intersecting with the characters' hopeful fantasy, make "Sunday" a bit of tough love. It is not a picture you particularly enjoy watching, but it has an emotional honsty that makes it impossible to look away. Friday, September 26, 1997 Two people, each of them very alone, meet one cold morning in Queens, New York, and come together in an unexpected way with unforeseeable results. The man (David Suchet) goes for a walk on a wintry, desolate Sunday and is approached by a woman who introduces herself as Madeline (Lisa Harrow); she asks him if he's Matthew Delacorta, a well-known filmmaker. He answers yes, and the two spend the rest of the day together. We later discover that the man's name is Oliver, and that he resides in a men's shelter. Among the other inhabitants there, Oliver stands apart and seems frightened of having any emotional contact. We're not sure why he is so isolated, nor who he really is, nor how he has come to reside there. Madeline, too, is alone, though she presents a much more vibrant and animated persona than Oliver does. She lives far from her native England, and her acting career has stagnated--partially, the film causes us to think, because she's no longer in the first blush of youth. In addition, she has a marriage disintegrating around her and a daughter caught in the middle. As Madeline, Lisa Harrow gives an amazingly powerful performance. Every time she was on screen, I felt that the film's impact was intensified manyfold. Contrasted against the rather enigmatic interactions of Oliver and Madeline are incredibly realistic scenes of the other men who live in the shelter. They fight, masturbate, work, and hang out. One man sits on a bench in a snowstorm, shivering. These scenes are so well acted that I kept thinking again and again how amazing the casting was. Even the way the shelter was structured, down to the filthy bathroom and dilapidated stairwells, really drew me in. It was incredibly real. What sounds like a simple story is also, in many ways, a mystery. Who are these people, really, and how did they come to this place in their lives? Are they liars? Crazy? How will this resolve itself? And how do we as the audience want things to be resolved? I really felt the chill and the loneliness of this film as well as the raw emotions that the characters expressed in subtle ways. I thought the script was smart and understated, successfully conveying regular, average-seeming people going through some hard times. Furthermore, I was consistently impressed by the high caliber of the acting. SUNDAY is a brave film that tries to address real sentiments. It's also different than just about anything I have ever seen. I struggled with it and didn't understand certain things about it, but I felt challenged by it. I appreciated that director (and co-screenwriter) Nossiter thought so much of his audience that he didn't hand everything to us without expecting us to work for it. Ultimately, however, I found SUNDAY difficult to watch. At times it was so slow-moving that it caused me to feel disassociated from the characters. I also had a hard time warming up to David Suchet's Oliver, which was a major obstacle, for me, in caring about who he was. One minor point: Queens gets a bum rap as a no-man's land filled with people who don't want to live there, which is a somewhat strange attitude to take towards a place where many people live and work and actually seem happy. |
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