Sunday * * * * ( out of * * * * ) By Fernando Vallejo
Starring David Suchet, Lisa Harrow, Jared Harris, Larry Pine, Joe Grifasi, Arnold Barkus and Jimmy Broadway. Directed by Jonathan Nossiter. Running Time: 93 minutes. Rated R _______________________________________________________________
A man briskly meanders alongside a Queens railroad station. His appearence leaves something to be desired: bald, overweight and despite his various items of clothing to protect from the chilly winter cold, he elicits gestures that indicate heat loss in some part of his ample body. Without warning, a woman, in her early fifties- late fourties approaches him. " Are you Matthew De La Corta " she rabidly asks with a punctuated British accent. " We met at a party in London " she adds. The woman, Madeleine, assumes the man she's formulating the question to is the famous English director she deeply admires.
" Yes " replies the man after a heavy pause. " I'm Matthew ". But as we've witnessed, a prolific film director residing in a homeless shelter, in a seedy part of the Big Apple is an impossible circumstance. Oliver, his actual name, plays along with the woman's erroneous presumption, and embarks on a journey, an odyssey of love, despreation, jealousy, pain and the other pathos of life, subsequently commencing the gripping "Sunday", winner of the 1997 Sundance film festival, and rightfully so. For here we have one of the most ardently passionate, visually absorbing and dramatically intriguing films of the deacde. Director Jonathan Nossiter's creation will likely conclude the year as 1997's best film.
As the story intensely marched on, I found myself glued to my seat. Experiencing "Sunday" produces the same enigmatic jolt similar to reading a novel by Dostoyevsky, albeit the structure is different, one gets the pleasurable satisfaction of seeing characters emotionally stripped down right before our eyes, symbolizing class, structure and frame of mind but also revealing their most intimate secrets and feelings. I was exhilarated, permeated into the lives of these two people, a man whose labor injustices ( he was unexpectedly fired form IBM ) have led him to unfold a side of his nature that has been greatly swayed by the poor environment he inhabits; a calm, callous gentleman who has discovered a new way of life, previously unfathomable to him -- and learned how to cope with it. His migration from an economically stable man to a quietly desolate, home-less living has left him no alternative but to live life day-by-day, abiding an unwanted existence one fears of enduring.
Madeleine, an amiable, yet dissatisfied aspiring actress who's been consistently undermined by his buffoonish and oppresive, whose own life hasn't been exatly the most ideal of them all. From her eyes, we see this excursion into the desired and the unknown as an escape from reguliarity, a testament to liberation, a ballad to unadulterated detachment.
As written by James Lasdun and Jonathan Nossiter, "Sunday" has the ability to be multi-layered without clogging our senses, whimsical yet not sentimentalizing and mystifying but not alienating us from the protagonists. Nossiter's crisp, cool and compelling direction is the sort of work that won "Shine's" Scott Hicks his first Oscar Nomination. And if that happening doesn't occur to Nossiter ( and the film ), I will dismiss the March event. Here is a film shot in an equally meager budget as "Chasing Amy" and "In The Company of Men", surpassing them both in the optical and scriptwriting departments.
The two leads are nothing short of superb. Suchet, last seen in the big-budget techno-thriller "Executive Decision", conveys the sense of loss from an everyday man with extreme restraint. He doesn't indulge in sorrow, but he prudently indicates us to symphatize with him as we contemplate his dead-end and how he functions around it. And it appears Oliver is prone to live his life as a journeyman, one day at a time, omitting the anguish that naturally arises. Madeleine, played magnificently by Lisa Harrow, fleshes out hewr character in an extremely convincing fashion. Madeleine is in better shape than Oliver, but surprisingly much more desperate and eager about her fate, representing that, at one juncture, money becomes irrelevant as to who you are. Harrow allows us to penetrate into her torture wonderfully.
But "Sunday's" perceptiveness extends to much more than that. We are immersed into the lives of Oliver's homeless fellows, how the Big Apple perceives them and we are there to understand what they live through. In one wonderful scene, we observe a scrawny fella ( who also convives eith Oliver in the shleter ), with a deep penetrating glare he stares at the legs of a woman he cannot see. Nossiter focuses the camera solely on her thighs, giving birth to what this man's sense of lust, the absence of her face acknowledges how vagrant folks have been fogotten by standard *society*.
As the credits of "Sunday" rolled, I remained calm in my seat, recollecting the situations and glares of the characters, admiring the power, the impeccable narrative and remembering the visually arresting ( New York's texture has rarely been captured so well ) sites Nossiter surrenders. "Sunday" is a true illustration of authentic movie magic.
(c) 1997 Fernando Vallejo IcyFascist@aol.com
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