Reviews

By Marshall Fine
� Gannett News Service

This is as good as independent filmmaking gets. A homeless man, played by David Suchet, meets an unemployed actress, played by Lisa Harrow, who mistakes him for a famous movie director. Mistaken identity turns into active deception as the issue becomes to what extent they can lie to each other and to themselves.

Winner of the top prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, "Sunday" is an offbeat, sometimes downbeat examination of the loss of dreams and the ways we deny that loss. Directed by Jonathan Nossiter from a script he co-wrote with James Lasdun, "Sunday" grows out the chance meeting of two people on a Sunday in Queens. Madeline (Lisa Harrow) is a sometime actress reduced to living with her estranged husband in an outer-borough, when what she really wants is to be working in Manhattan. On her way home from the grocery, she runs across the very man who she believes can whisk her away from this subsistence existence: Matthew Dellacorta (David Suchet), the famous movie director. Spotting him on the street, she boldly introduces herself, reminding him of the time they met at a party. Quietly, with great deference, he allows her to take him to a local diner and buy him coffee as she unreels her recent tawdry history. From his spare conversation, she deduces that he is in Queens scouting locations for a new film. Or is he? In fact, her movieland savior may be Oliver, a homeless man she has mistaken for Dellacorta. He feints and dodges questions of substance, drawing his answers from the questions and from what he picks up from Madeline's conversation. "Sunday" is a movie of great longing and disappointment, captured in alternately poignant and ruefully funny ways. But it would be an even better film than it is if Nossiter had left this wandering man's identity more of a question mark. As it is, this film suffers from a kind of alter-ego: a documentary-style subplot about the men who live at a Queens homeless shelter. Nossiter cuts back and forth between Madeline and Oliver and the residents of the shelter, as they each find ways to fill a day with nowhere to go and no money to do it. That in itself might have made an intriguing film; instead, it winds up as a rather obvious counterpoint to the more haunting story being told. David Suchet does an amazing thing as Oliver/Dellacorta: He creates a character who is a kind of cipher, a man so beaten by life that he willingly abandons reality for the handiest fantasy that comes along. Like Peter Sellers' Chauncey Gardner in "Being There," this character hungers for the identity someone else can project on him. Harrow is, well, harrowing as a woman so blinded by her own unhappiness that she willingly falls into an intimate relationship with a stranger, based on the possibility of who he might be. It is a performance wrenching enough to conjure the work Gena Rowlands did in some of John Cassavetes' films. "Sunday" is two-thirds of a good movie, its power watered down, diluted by the extraneous story it also tries to tell. Yet its two central performances make it one of the year's most intriguing entries.

Farcical Sunday finds mirth on the Sabbath

By M.V. Moorhead

On the wintry Sabbath referred to by the title of Jonathan Nossiter's Sunday, a middle-aged homeless man wanders the streets of Queens. Nothing new there. His name is Oliver (David Suchet), and he used to be a married, white-collar company man with IBM, but now he's divorced, alone, sleeping in a Presbyterian Men's Shelter, and he has nothing to do with his days. On a Sunday, he can't even look for work.

This particular Sunday proves unusually lively for Oliver, however. Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a beautiful, middle-aged Englishwoman, approaches him on the street, mistaking him for Matthew Delacorta, a famous film director. She's an out-of-work actress, stuck in Queens in a bad marriage, and she believes Delacorta--whom she met once, briefly--must be scouting locations for his next film in the borough.

Oliver is overwhelmed by the unaccustomed sensation of someone actually seeking him out, wanting his time. Madeleine speaks to him eagerly, enthusiastically, and he can't resist letting her schmooze him. He lets her do all the talking. She doesn't expect him to remember her, and she takes his quiet politeness for reserve and aloofness--just what her faded professional status has led her to expect. He ends up in her shabby house, drinking her wine and making love to her.

This odd little encounter between two lonely souls is poignant, but it isn't as nasty as it probably sounds in description. Deeply gloomy, this comedy of mistaken identity is also sweet and frazzled, and tinged with the angry passion of the dispossessed. It's as if a Preston Sturges movie had been rewritten by the early Samuel Beckett.

By slow, elliptical waves, Nossiter, working from a script he co-wrote with James Lasdun (based on Lasdun's short story), lets us in on the guiding gag of the plot--that Oliver will spend this Sunday as Matthew Delacorta whether he likes it or not. He's basically a principled man, so he tries to play square with Madeleine before things go too far. She asks him to tell her a story--Delacorta has a reputation as a raconteur--and he uses the opportunity to admit who he really is, and why he allowed the deception to go on as long as it did.

When he then tells her that it's her turn to tell a story, Madeleine turns on the seductive charm and responds with a similarly fanciful-sounding tale. She is so busy reflexively auditioning that she doesn't realize she's just heard a confession.

As Nossiter keeps gently but insistently piling on these complications, Sunday takes on the unsettling quality of a grave, solemn farce. The leads perform with heroic restraint, eschewing both cheap laughs and cheap pathos. Suchet--popular as Hercule Poirot on Brit TV and as heavies in many American action movies--and Harrow--best known here for the third Omen movie and for The Last Days of Chez Nous--find an excitingly subtle rhythm for their emotional shifts. One minute they seem almost sinister, the next pitiful, the next gallant, yet the transitions aren't jarring, and they all fit into the characters. They make real screen lovers, too. In their pasty, fleshy birthday suits, they have the beauty and sexuality that come with fearless, soulful acting.

There's a whole second level to Sunday, in which the Oliver/Madeleine strand is intercut with quick glimpses of the other guys from Oliver's shelter. Perhaps Nossiter and Lasdun felt that it was necessary to depict the "real," routine experience of being homeless, as opposed to Oliver's twist of fate. The actors in these cutaway scenes, especially Jared Harris, Joe Sirola, Willis Burks and real-life street singer Chen Tsun Kit, are highly convincing, but the vignettes don't amount to much in themselves, and they don't really comment on the main plot, either.

There are other ragged edges to Sunday, and they must be at least partly intentional--a comedy about homelessness would seem suspect if it was too slick. But not all of this artful grit helps the film; some of it just feels like muddle. Madeleine's relations with her estranged husband (Larry Pine) never come into focus, and the film's ending is an unsatisfying nonconclusion. Overall, however, Sunday is an elusive and fascinating study in human need.

Clever scripting and great acting elevate Sunday from its low-budget trappings.

By Bill Gallo

In Jonathan Nossiter's brooding Sunday, the oft-maligned borough of Queens is seen as a snowy wasteland of crumbling warehouses and lonely subway stations through which the lame and the halt wander like zombies. Just the place, Nossiter reasons, to set a psychological mystery about loss of identity and the power of illusions. It's a curiously arty film to unfold in a setting so bleak, but it falls together like magic.

As far as we can tell, the desperate protagonists are a shy former IBM technician named Oliver (David Suchet), who's been reduced to subsistence in a men's shelter after losing his job, and an exiled British actress named Madeleine Vesey (Lisa Harrow), whose career has disintegrated. To call them unmoored is to understate the case: They're both suffocating in isolation and anomie. Or so we're led to believe.

Sunday's first bizarre turn comes when the theatrical Madeleine, carrying a leafy houseplant as tall as a doorway, stumbles across gloomy, balding Oliver in the chill street and, for better or worse, greets him as though he were a famous movie director named Matthew Delacorta, a man she knew slightly back home in London. Needy himself, Oliver doesn't disabuse Madeleine of the notion, and Nossiter proceeds with a drama of delusions indulged, identities juggled, facts and fictions deliriously scrambled.

We also get disconcerting glimpses of Oliver/Matthew's fellow sufferers from the shelter as they bicker in the TV room, beg for alms in the subway and wander the streets, waiting for the future to happen. The idea, I suppose, is that all of us are continually deconstructing and reconstructing the fragments of our lives, searching for something like the whole thing. That Madeleine (an actress whose life has been built on illusions) and Oliver (whose illusions have been imposed on him) find common ground in dream and desire is not really so strange, not in a no-man's-land where Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot might wind up at the same grimy lunch table.

All is not grim. Director Nossiter and co-writer James Lasdun (whose short story is the source here) spike their film with dark humor. Madeleine regrets that all she's offered these days are "living dead mutant" roles, and when she hauls both Oliver and her houseplant into a local diner, she demands a "table for three." There's also the odd matter of her estranged husband, Ben (Larry Pine), who has a foot-long scar down the middle of his chest. Is this really the result of Madeleine's attack with a kitchen knife, or open-heart surgery? That's just one of the comic mysteries Nossiter declines to resolve, preferring to indulge the imagination of the audience in much the same way Madeleine and Oliver indulge each other.

There are times when Sunday seems to overreach. The spectacle of Oliver/Matthew trying out his Matthew Delacorta persona at a children's birthday party is one thing; when Madeleine quotes him as once having told her that "doubt is the protoplasm of all real art," we can hear director and writer using character as mouthpiece.

Winner of the best-film award and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, Sunday is the kind of intellectually challenging picture the independent movement continues to produce in its revivalist period. Low-budget but highly ambitious, it neither underestimates its audience nor hesitates to take chances. Luckily, it also features acting far beyond the usual made-on-a-shoestring standard. The combination of Suchet, with his hangdog looks and seeming bafflement, and Harrow, employing dotty, Norma Desmond-esque airs, form an intriguing folie a deux and--if you'll pardon a whiff of pretension--a surprisingly powerful dual portrait of the human condition. Who among us has not become unhinged and found the means, fictional or real, to survive? In the end, Nossiter leaves us with more questions than answers about the identities of Madeleine and Oliver. He has recognized all along that a labyrinth is more interesting than the light at the exit, and he dares to let us invent these lives, just as we invent our own.

That's the kind of thing that earns deserved raves at Sundance and down at your local art house, if not in the La-La Land of animatronic dinosaurs and jet planes stuffed with dangerous convicts or hijacked presidents. Goodbye, summertime. Come September, moviegoers are suddenly allowed to think again.

Every Day is Silent and Gray

By Angie Drobnic

What if you could be an entirely different person for just one day? A brief escape from a depressing, empty life makes up the story of Sunday, a modest yet beautiful film that explores issues of identity and loneliness between two people who spend one Sunday together in Queens, N.Y.

Oliver, a laid-off IBM worker, leaves his homeless shelter on that fateful Sunday to walk the streets and spend yet another day trying to figure out how he got to the point where he is and how to get out of it. Madeleine, an out-of-work, middle-aged actress, is similarly grappling with her future after a divorce and looming custody fight. These two lost souls just happen to be walking on the same street when Madeleine sees Oliver and believes him to be the famous film director Matthew Delacorta. She introduces herself to him, and Oliver plays along with her belief that he is someone other than himself. They soon end up in her apartment, where they make love and spend the rest of the day together.

But the deception of Oliver's identity is a two-way street. As the day progresses, it becomes clear that Madeleine desperately wants to believe that Oliver is Matthew just as badly as Oliver does. And, as time passes, both their identities--real and assumed--seem to matter less and less in the face of the emotional connection the couple reaches.

With such a quietly subtle script, the strength of Sunday is that it is filmed in such a way that energy permeates the movie. The bustle of morning at the homeless shelter, the lively streets of Queens and the clutter of Madeleine's apartment are photographed so that they become almost exotic locales for what is essentially a love story. The soundtrack is also extremely effective: Stately opera music plays as the camera takes in lowly butcher shops and subways.

Naturally, the actors who play the two main roles in a film like this bear a huge burden. Lisa Harrow plays Madeleine with a skittish intensity that suits her character perfectly. And David Suchet as Oliver/Matthew is simply phenomenal. Best known for playing Hercule Poirot in PBS's Agatha Christie series, Suchet here plays the polar opposite of a debonair detective with surprising skill. Director Jonathan Nossiter asked Suchet to put on 47 pounds for Sunday, which he did for a role that has several nude scenes.

One of the most interesting things about Sunday is its unsettling ending. Without giving too much away, the movie disconcerts because it does the exact opposite of what you might expect. There is no grand climactic scene where Oliver is dramatically exposed for what he is while Madeleine is shocked and horrified. Instead, the events merely unfold, and the viewer is left to come to his or her own conclusions about the couple's relationship.

Sunday has won a passel of awards, including the 1997 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for Best Film. It's not hard to see why: It's an incredibly well-crafted film with excellent performances. But at the same time, it's such an unflashy and subtle work--the simple story of two lonely, middle-aged losers--that it's quite different from your typical quirky film-fest-winner fare. It's the unassuming and vulnerable nature of the story that make it stand out from other independent films and make Sunday a unique and unusual film.