Sunday (1997)Steve Rhodes
SUNDAY, by new screenwriters James Lasdun and Jonathan Nossiter and new director Jonathan Nossiter, is just the sort of film that gives art house movies a bad name. Its plot labyrinth hints at an some undisclosed intellectual reward if you can figure out its message. But, when you finally understand the plot, most viewers will probably feel cheated since the journey is not worth the reward. The writers have surprisingly little to say, and what is said is quite dated and unrealistic. The story is set against a cold and bleak landscape in the New York City borough of Queens. Dirty snow dots the terrain like spots on an old pair of trousers. Homeless people are the main inhabitants of this movie's village. As the picture opens, a group of men in a homeless shelter scratch out a meager existence. The camera flits from person to person as we catch snippets of meaningless dialog. Instead of hearing intelligent writing, we get to see the inside of a filthy toilet bowl and listen as our protagonist urinates into it. David Suchet, best know as television's most recent and best Hercule Poirot, plays a homeless man named Oliver. Although many may find it disquieting to hear Suchet speak with an American accent, his accent is quite good, perhaps too good, being so nondescript that he seems to have been born to two television newscasters. His performance in the film can also be argued to be of too high a quality. With him associated with the picture, it is harder to write it off, and it makes one try to find something worthwhile in the story, which is a futile search. One day Oliver meets an actress named Madeleine Vesey, played as an uninteresting enigma by Lisa Harrow. Madeleine says that she knows Oliver and that he is the famous director Matthew Delacorta, whom she once met in London. Oliver goes along and soon they are swapping stories that are mixtures of truth and fantasy. The twist is that some of the fantasies will happen later in the movie. This all sounds more engrossing than it is, thanks to the writers' inability to fashion a coherent narrative and create any compelling characters. To make up for it, they include random scenes of homeless people wandering the city streets and even singing opera in the subway. Eventually, in one of the least erotic sex scenes in some time, Oliver and Madeleine join bodies but little else. Later she reflects, "I don't really know you except in a Biblical sense." Finally -- drum roll -- the film comes to its putative point. Oliver confesses that he was until recently an IBM company man. He was a middle-class man with a wife, and he worked in accounting at IBM for twenty years before being laid off. The story would have us believe that this forced him into a fast spiral downward so that he lost everything. He is now penniless, alone, and living in a men's shelter. Given IBM's generous pension and severance pay, one has to assume a lot, proof of the disconnect between the screenwriter's world and the real world. "You can really fall a long way in this country," is how Madeleine puts it. "No work, no hope for work, like every day's Sunday," explains Oliver. Apparently he has never seen the classified section bursting with ads looking for people. With his middle-class background and his talents, he should have no trouble finding employment. The message of this sad and depressing little film is that jobs in America can be quite hard to find -- even for middle-class professionals. And if you lose yours, you could be broke and homeless in no time at all. SUNDAY runs 1:33. It is not rated but would be an R for profanity, sex, nudity, and mature themes. The film would be acceptable for older teenagers. I do not recommend the picture, and I give it * 1/2 only for a fine performance by David Suchet in an otherwise dismal film.
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