Domingo é Dia...

Sunday (1997) is a beautiful film about a lost day in the lives of two lost people. It is also about their attempts to locate themselves and connect to each other. It is complicated, sad, haunted, angry, hopeful, sweet, awkward, mysterious, confusing, gritty, and ultimately quite everyday and ordinary. Something tremendous is happening in this film, and this something is poetry.

This film was shown on the IFC channel. I had not heard of it before. After seeing it, I believe it deserved a wider distribution and more formal review by the critics.

I found the film to be hypnotic. The two leading actors, David Suchet and Lisa Harrow, played their roles in natural and unabashed manner that in a way kind of made me feel less like a voyeur, but more as an observer. I found myself drawn to protagonists in a very sympathetic way and into their short lived relationship.

Watching this film is time well spent.

If Queens is truly an `un-place,' then 'Sunday' is an `un-film.' That is to say un-believably magnificent! To give this masterpiece a particular label, would rob this wonderfully imaginative film of the root of its quirky charm.

I was not familiar with the work of either David Suchet or Lisa Harrow, though I did recognize the name of the director, Jonathan Nossiter.

This delightful and honest film rearranges stereotypical categorizations and societal stigmas by transporting us to the `other side of the glass.' While not in great detail, we are acquainted with each member of the men's shelter, which is the location around which 'Sunday' revolves. Some characters are endearing, such as the Vietnamese man who sings opera tunes to canned music in the subway for change, or Ray, the red-haired chain-smoking man who roams the street looking at women's legs and relentlessly searching for the ultimate porn mag.

I believe that this again supports the central theme, which discourages as well as discredits the practice of labeling and stigmatizing. The viewer is forced instead, to get to know the men and appreciate each of them on the basis of their individuality.

'Sunday' creatively addresses many issues: shame, regret, pride, and deceit. Suchet's character, the protagonist, Oliver Levy-who may or may not be an alias for the famed film director, Matthew de la Corta-is a disillusioned middle-aged fellow who, by way of an unlikely exchange on the streets if Queens, meets Harrow's Madeleine, a woman of similar age and emotional status. The pretense of their meeting is initially awkward and unusual, if not completely bizarre.

However, as the film progresses, a most amazing transformation occurs. Within a mere twelve-hour period, amid large amounts of uncertainty, assumption and tactful execution of the imagination, Madeleine and Matthew become tremendously close. By evening, after a few choice run-ins with Madeleine's estranged (as well as strange) husband, Ben, she and Matthew are seen holding hands in a Queens diner, talking intimately like old friends.

The point is finally stated-after having been corroborated by the preceding film-that although the world would like to base our worth on `what we do,' in the sense of corporate achievement, the true quality of a person lies, rather, in who we think we are. The way in which we are perceived and subsequently accepted by the people who love us and believe in our potential to succeed, is far more instrumental in our pursuit of fulfillment.

Life, inside as well as outside the shelter, is a collection of intricate and unique parts that constitute a whole. Each person has within himself or herself the power to be great, but greatness is subjective. This film proves that love can be found anywhere, whether in a shabby diner over the odd Ozarta, or while walking back from a subway lugging a large house plant.

'Sunday' gloriously shows us that whether ones glasses are on or off, it is not with the eyes, but with the heart that we can clearly see the wondrous spectacle of true love.

I went to see this movie because I knew Amy Hobby the producer. I was pleasantly surprised, except for some bad sound at the beginning, it was a movie that addressed the idea of loneliness and desperation in average people. Both the actors did a good job of bringing sensitive interpretation to their roles, but I was a little confused by the ending and I never did figure out the husband's place in the trio.

The film's gritty outer-borough images of Queens, familiar to any born and bred New Yorker, got my attention instantly. But it was the film's two principal characters--both middle-aged, both survivors of difficult lives--that sustained it. He, an out-of-work middle management type, is a victim of corporate downsizing now living in a homeless shelter among a multiethnic, multiracial horde of down-and-outers, where he struggles to maintain bare-minimum standards of privacy and personal hygiene--and where remnants of his middle-class life set him apart from his surroundings. She, a faded beauty and still-struggling actress, maintains an oddly genteel life in a rundown two-family house nearby, surrounded by weedy lots and shuttered factories. As they meet and proceed to remove their masks, a kind of love story--brief, impossible, and ultimately doomed, is ignited. This is a beautifully shot and acted film, and a deeply affecting one.