How others will see it. Sunday is not a family movie, or a date movie. It is a character study, more bitter than sweet. It has no action, but plenty of humiliation is heaped on our "unpersons," as Madeleine calls the aimless and perpetually discouraged residents of Queens.
This movie is entertainingly only for those folks who are more interested in characters than adventures. There is no mystery about Oliver, who has given up hope of reclaiming his lost identity of a married, middle-class office worker.
How I felt about it. But what about Madeleine? Does she really believe this polite but nerdy and overweight individual is a film director, hanging in Queens by himself to scout shooting locations? She is a resourceful, interesting, mysterious woman whose principal goal is to get out of a bad relationship with her stalker ex-husband Ben (Larry Pine). Does she pick up broken-down men as lovers to nurse them back to spiritual health, to satisfy her own need for companionship, or to convince Ben that his presence is no longer welcome?
But since she lives in Queens, which in this movie is the Island of Lost Souls, she has to eat humble pie like everyone else. Ben shows up at untimely moments to make trouble, and her new Romeo is not only overweight and balding. He's also easily intimidated.
But no one receives more humiliation than Oliver. Meeting Madeleine provides a ray of hope long absent from his life. However, his status with her is threatened. He has no money. He is confronted with a jealous and unstable rival. He must pretend to be someone famous he doesn't know in order to be with a woman whose interest in him may be only passing. She might even see him as sport.
Finally, his final safety net, the mission that shelters and feeds him, will evict him if he breaks curfew. If he chooses Madeleine over the mission, will she come through for him? While Sunday is a movie, it's not Hollywood, and the fate of character is open-ended.
Madeleine's pretense against all logic of Oliver as a director is a marvelous relationship-opening device. One always has conversational topics: his past work, and future projects. These put her in control, since she knows Oliver will be hapless discussing films he allegedly made but never saw, and films he'll never make that he also knows nothing about. The game of grownup pretend trumps reality: he's homeless, and she's a failed actress.