Powerful ‘Sunday’ Creates Its Own Joy

When you’re a kid, September is the cruelest month. And Sunday, naturally, is the cruelest day of the week. It marks the end of freedom, the resumption of work, the cusp of hope and horror. It’s time you spend the way you spend your last dollar, with all the unbridled joy of the condemned.

This sentiment fades, of course, but does it ever really go away? (Think right now about last Sunday night or the melancholic, fast-approaching September.) And what is it that makes a Sunday a Sunday? That a person has somewhere to go--and something to do--on Monday. When they don’t, then Sunday is likely no day at all. And every day.

In Jonathan Nossiter’s complex, unsettling, disquieting “Sunday,” we have two people with nowhere to go: Oliver (David Suchet), a downsized IBM accountant living in a Queens men’s shelter, and Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a middle-aged English actress with an estranged husband, an adopted daughter and no work.

They meet in a swirl of fiction. “You’re Matthew Dellacorta,” she says to Oliver on the street one early Sunday morning, “the film director.” Oliver agrees that he is. They eat, mate, bond and wrap their manufactured mystery around themselves like a psychic lifeline.

Nossiter, whose previous feature was the Quentin Crisp film “Resident Alien,” is trying--and largely succeeding--to give us an autopsy on fiction itself. When Madeleine asks him to tell her a story, Oliver obliges with his own, complete with the very fabrication they’re experiencing at that moment. She replies with a story of her own, which is her own story, albeit with a horror-movie ending--real life being not too boring but simply too brutal.

Cutting occasionally away from Madeleine and Oliver, and checking in with the other wandering residents of the genteel/squalid men’s home (played by, among others, Jared Harris, Joe Sirola and Willis Burks), Nossiter creates atmosphere. But he also is suggesting the existence of multiple realities, multiple identities, multiple stages of ego disintegration, the varied interpretations of Oliver’s life. The cinematography (by Michael Barrow, John Foster and Daniel Lerner) is clean and bright and crisp; the effect is a cool beauty and bracing disinterest.

But the real disturbance in “Sunday”--which won the feature and screenplay prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival--lies in the truths the characters tell each other. Even as they dismiss them.

Or use them for protection. Or wield them as weapons--against Madeleine’s unpleasant husband, Ben (Larry Pine), for instance--and the way the line of demarcation always blurs. What is real and what is fiction, after all, is never a case of truth: When Oliver explains the plot of his “new movie”--about a middle-class everyman who’s lost everything--Madeleine tells him what a marvelous story it would be. Even as she’s in it. Even as we watch.

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Suchet, who plays Hercule Poirot on the PBS “Mystery!” series and is quite unrecognizable here, gives a virtuoso turn as Oliver, a man who’s as physically uncomfortable with the world as the world is with him; he is, after all, the unpleasant detail of a thriving economy, the homeless man who doesn’t fit the derelict profile.

Harrow, always so powerful and quietly moving, here is a Londoner cast adrift in Queens (itself cast as a land of the lost) and gives a tremendous performance.

Oliver and Madeleine dwell in different hells together, very personal states from which they cannot escape save perhaps through each other--and then Nossiter burdens them with too much insight for such a neat trick.

It might have been depressing, of course, all this frustrated humanity, but “Sunday” has such a sense of its own self-possession--and the all-embracing reach of its own fiction--that its downbeat rhythms are something close to exhilarating.

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* Unrated. Times guidelines: nudity and adult situations.

‘Sunday’

David Suchet: Matthew/Oliver

Lisa Harrow: Madeleine Vesey

Jared Harris: Ray

Larry Pine: Ben Vesey

Joe Grifasi: Scotti Elster

Arnold Barkus: Andy

Cineplex Film Properties present a Goatworks production, in association with Sunday Productions and Double A Films. by Director Jonathan Nossiter. Producers Jonathan Nossiter, Alix Madigan & Jed Alpert. Screenplay by James Lasdun & Jonathan Nossiter. Cinematographers Michael Barrow, John Foster. Editor Madeleine Gavin. Costumes Kathryn Nixon. Production design Deana Sidney. Art director Stephen Beatrice. Set decorator Anna Park. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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