Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quirky lyrical drama...with a great bonus feature, December 9, 2005
The premier extra on this DVD is the interview that the film's director, Jonathan Nossiter, conducts with one of the great American directors, Arthur Penn, called "Searching for Arthur". Nossiter himself is a strange combination of self-conscious and intellectually smug, but when Penn is allowed to speak, it's fascinating.
The film itself, Sunday, in spite of the director's personality that oozes through during the interview with Penn, is actually very good. David Suchet plays Oliver, a middle class IBM manager who's been thrown out of his job, now living in a shelter. By chance, he meets Madeleine, a British actress living in New York, whose marriage is crumbling and who appears to be having a hard time finding work. The two of them connect by a mutual understanding of their sorrowful plights using the clever mechanism of telling each other "made up" stories that reflect their real thoughts and feelings about each other. This is compounded by Madeleine's initially mistaking Oliver for a film director, Matthew Delacorta, and then continuing through with this charade, even though she knows it's not true.
One of the plot devices that gives this film a tremendous boost is the intercutting between scenes of Oliver and Madeleine together with scenese depicting life in the homeless shelter where Oliver has come to stay. The men in the shelter--one of whom is played by an actual homeless man, Jimmy Broadway, with a great theatrical presence--are by turns vindictive, lost, petty, and hopeful. Jared Harris in particular is excellent as Ray, one of the homeless men.
Nossiter does not let the viewer off easy with a stereotypical development of the relationship between Oliver and Madeleine. This is an emotionally complex pairing, a coupling in which each person knows each other's needs for the other, knows how desperate both of them are, and at the same time, knows there is tenderness lurking in there somewhere--it's just a matter of teasing it out.
The film is shot through with great flashes of lyricism and visual panache, and was the winner of Un Certain Regard at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. It's easy to see why; this is a unique work of cinema that shows a real talent who has both book smarts and street smarts and a heart as well.
Recommended.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lost People, November 20, 2004
I saw myself in this film of probable mistaken identity.
It is the story of a man who loses everything and ends up in a New York homeless shelter with people who are very petty and is basically an outsider. So on a "Sunday" he takes a walk and runs into a women who mistakes him for a film director and they spend the day together. I liked this film as it is a small world film ( Small world films are cinema of characters who live lives of small events;the lost of a job,making a change,finding love, getting through a day. films to see...Dogfight,Palookaville,A Thousand Clowns,the Goodbye People,Death of a salesman) As note this cinema has a carnal scene between Madeleine and Oliver; it happens and may shock some people that people 40 and over actually fornicate. It is not very romantic or a love scene out of a movie like Moll Flanders,Lady Chatterley's Lover or Tom Jones. So spend "Sunday" with these characters and visit the small world
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Offbeat drama leaves the viewer puzzled, dissatisfied, July 24, 2006
Originality, superb writing, good direction, and acting leads David Suchet and Lisa Harrow are the reasons this very dissatisfying film earns five stars. Under this critic's system, when everything is excellent, a movie could end in the middle, with all the loose ends left untied, and still achieve the highest rating. This is just about the case here. Many loose ends are left dangling at the end. Many questions are left unanswered. But this is by design. It forces the viewer to ponder and analyze the film for hours and perhaps days after watching. Personally I would have preferred an ending where the questions are answered, but the ending fits in with the entire story which is, let's face it, a bit trippy. The entire story seems inspired or at least reminiscent of psychedelic mushrooms, though it's not as far out there as say, "Mulholland Drive" which I found a bit too schizo, not to mention ugly. This movie is thankfully nonviolent and more thoughtful, with ideas thrown out in comprehensible language, as opposed to "Mulholland Drive" which was downright incoherent or at any rate, impenetrably cryptic.
I became an admirer of the versatile David Suchet after watching his performance as Poirot in the excellent detective series of the same name, and as the comic villain in Anthony Trollope's "The Way We Live Now". The reason I tried this movie is simply because he was in it. But Lisa Harrow is by no means inferior, and holds up her end admirably. If only Hollywood would take a long overdue clue, and learn to cast talented older actors more often, instead of pretty faces with empty heads like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman, maybe people would come back to the cinema.
I would even watch this again. The film requires all one's faculties. A zero beer movie. Brew a cup of coffee.
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