'Sunday' a difficult but rewarding filmJEFF MILLAR
SUNDAY is difficult. It has its rewards, but you'll have to hang in there. The movie blew the doors off this year's Sundance festival -- Grand Jury Prize for best film and best screenplay -- and has an art-cinema provenance. Writer-director Jonathan Nossiter seems to think entirely in subtext. Still, this story of loneliness is as every bit as affecting as he intends it to be. Synopsis considerably tames Nossiter's narrative scheme and makes suppositions where Nossiter offers no certainty. On a cold Sunday morning in a shabby section of Queens, some residents wake up in a shelter for homeless men. With a Sunday to fill and no resources except their feet, the men scatter to various points in New York City. One goes into the subway to sing karaoke opera for tips. Another sits on a bench, an umbrella held against the snow. Nossiter focuses on a balding, short, tubby man in his late 40s, better-dressed than the others. You would not know to look at him that he lives in a shelter. You would know by looking at him that his heart is wounded in some primary way. He responds to the greeting of a middle-aged woman carrying a large and bedraggled plant. She says in a British accent that she is Madeleine. She calls him Matthew, knows him as a film director for whom she worked once in London. She is an actress at an age when it can be a long time between engagements. The man blinks and decides to accept the identity Madeleine imposes on him. We learn later that his name, for what it's worth, is Oliver. At some point, an unvocalized acknowledgement passes between Madeleine and Oliver that he is not a film director -- but they continue to act as though he were the Matthew the woman once knew. This is the point where Sunday becomes a venture for experienced and adventurous filmgoers. Why this man and woman continue with their misunderstanding is not at question. It is affectingly clear that Oliver/Matthew is lonely and Madeleine is even more lonely in a strange marriage. Her husband, Ben, is used to his wife bringing strange men home and then upstairs, while he goes to the basement and transmits faxes 30 feet long to his bedroom. Sunday is extraordinarily well-acted by its principals. Lisa Harrow plays Madeleine. David Suchet, also British, plays Oliver/Matthew with an errorless American accent. Nossiter, making his first film, has valuable collaborators in Michael Barrow and John Foster, who photographed the film, and especially Madeleine Gavin, who edited it. Film editing is a quality that generally isn't supposed to be noticed. But Gavin's choices firm up Nossiter's diffuse narrative. She dangles carefully timed disclosure as a carrot just enough ahead of our confusion to hold our interest. Look particularly at a scene involving Madeleine, Matthew/Oliver and Ben (Larry Pine): Nossiter has his characters awkwardly arranged at different levels along a flight of stairs, presenting Gavin with a spatial challenge. Madeleine and Matthew/Oliver want to keep approaching each other while ostensibly keeping at a distance. Ben wants to disrupt them; he knows what's going on and cruelly does not let on that he knows. The jagged dialogue overlaps. A character's reaction to a line might come four lines later. That very difficult scene works because Gavin makes it work.
|