Sunday

Most people are only a few paychecks away from the street, and a few rebukes removed from a complete loss of identity. Such is the premise of Jonathan Nossiter's sour, enigmatic, ultimately frustrating Sunday. Every day is Sunday for Oliver (David Suchet, PBS's Hercule Poirot), a laid-off computer technician still stunned to wake up each morning in a gnarly, hostile homeless shelter instead of his cozy middle-class home. Forced out on the street in the daytime, he wanders the tacky byways of the Queens until he's accosted by Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a fading British actress who mistakes him for independent filmmaker Matthew Delacorta.

Oliver plays along and follows her home, and after a psychodramatic dialogue in which both reinvent their lives, he shtups her on the staircase in what may be the least erotic love scene since Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway got it on in Don Juan DeMarco. Is Oliver really Matthew? Is Madeleine genuinely in error or is she playing a sinister game? Did she really open her husband's chest with a pair of pruning shears? Why is their daughter Asian? Sunday poses the questions but makes the answers not only elusive but uninteresting; despite the unnerving performances of the cast, the film remains more misty than mystifying. Screens at the Copley Place Saturday the 13th at 5, 7, and 9 p.m. and Sunday the 14th at 11:15 a.m. and 1:15 and 3:10 p.m.

-- Peter Keough

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