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The Sunday Woman



An odious architect is beaten to death and a high society wife (Jacqueline Bisset, Day for Night) and her gay friend (Jean-Louis Trintignant, The Conformist) are the key suspects with a discarded letter implicating them in the crime. Commissioner Santamaria (Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini's 8 ½) is assigned to the case and tries to uncover the murder suspect in upper-class Turin. With a murder mystery narrative worthy of Agatha Christie, The Sunday Woman is also a sharp critique of Turin's upper crust. The screenplay, by the celebrated duo Age & Scarpelli, famed for their masterpieces in the Commedia all'Italiana boom including Big Deal on Madonna Street and The Organizer, is a whip-smart adaptation of the best-selling novels by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini with the lead character of Santamaria inspired by the real-life head of the Flying Squad. The much-heralded director Luigi Comencini (Misunderstood) often worked in a combination of comedy and drama, finding humour in tragedy, and is only waiting to be rediscovered as a master of post-war Italian cinema.

Limited Edition Special Features:

• 2K restoration of the film from the original negative
• Original uncompressed mono PCM audio
• Newly filmed and archival interviews to be confirmed
• A visual essay on the career of Jean-Louis Trintignant's career in Italy by critic and author Tim Lucas (2022)
• Trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film
• Limited edition of 2000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

This film is one of cinema's unsung masterpieces. Whilst not wholly Giallo it owes any awful lot to the genre and with a unique queer subplot. The surprise ending is an absolute doozy and ahead of it's time - you really need to watch the film to know what I mean because I'm not going to spoil it, just that it is something way more relevant today than it was back in the mid 1970s. The slight touch of macabre humour is very well placed.

Aunt Peg wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 12:39 pm The surprise ending is an absolute doozy and ahead of it's time - you really need to watch the film to know what I mean because I'm not going to spoil it, just that it is something way more relevant today than it was back in the mid 1970s.

Having just watched this, I'm afraid I need a spoiler explanation, because I have no idea what about the ending you're referring to here?

I found this to be more or less a standard police mystery buoyed heavily by Marcello Mastroianni's amusingly laidback perf and not much else. I enjoyed the persistent comic tone of the action (complete with the silly runner of Mastroianni imagining everyone he meets as the potential killer, each swinging a stone marital aid about with wild abandon), but it still didn't add up to much for me in the end.

domino harvey wrote: Mon Sep 19, 2022 3:31 amperf

This is the stuff

Looks like a great blind buy

Fran mentioned on the Chasing Labels podcast that he was working on two Comencini films. I'm really hoping the other is Misunderstood (I'ncompreso) since it's mentioned in the description for The Sunday Woman.

Glowingwabbit wrote: Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:14 pm Fran mentioned on the Chasing Labels podcast that he was working on two Comencini films. I'm really hoping the other is Misunderstood (I'ncompreso) since it's mentioned in the description for The Sunday Woman.

I watched L'incompreso on my iPad on a flight to Florence the other week, not realising the film is set there! I'm not sure it is Comencini's best, but I'd end up buying it.

out 17 April, final specs announced:

2K restoration of the film from the original negative, presented in the original 1.33:1 and an alternate 1.85:1 widescreen presentation
Original uncompressed mono PCM audio
Newly filmed interview with academic and Italian cinema expert Richard Dyer, who looks at The Sunday Woman (2022, 18 mins)
Archival interview with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli who discusses his work on the film (2008, 22 mins)
Newly filmed interview with academic and screenwriter Giacomo Scarpelli, who discusses the life and work of his father, Furio Scarpelli and his writing partner Agenore Incrocci (2022, 36 mins)
Archival French TV interview with Jean-Louis Trintignant in which the actor discusses The Sunday Woman (1976, 4 mins)
Trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
Limited edition 24-page booklet featuring new writing on the film by Mariangela Sansone and a reprint of an archival piece on the film
Limited edition of 2000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

seems like a really solid edition. reversible cover pic:

Spoiler

I liked this a lot more than I anticipated, but that's probably because it's actually a loose-fitting pulp thriller adaptation that can't resist the urge to become a commedia all'italiana - a type of film I rarely find amusing, but gets a lot of mileage here for flaunting its lazy immaturity with an almost-accidental reflexivity, breaking into laughable theatrics every time it attempts to take itself as seriously as the source material. Right off the bat, we get a montage full of familiar signs and motifs of sex comedies and whodunit page-turners, blended together to create a sense of cheeky self-consciousness, but under a leisurely current that doesn't look to pronounce some acidic, satirical bent. It's a lot more fun for its irreverent imprudence through evasion of grandeur.

We're casually introduced to a society desensitized to murder. Regardless of class or status, every individual in this film treats the crime as a game or fantasy, like participants in a movie, for (often-ignorantly) egocentric reasons. The 'help' dismiss the murder's significance and try to negotiate a selfish financial lawsuit out of found 'evidence'. The boyfriend attempts to solve the murder, not just out of love, but because he anxiously perceives that his lover's interest may be wilting, and these selfish concerns prompt a grand gesture to try to secure allegiance, affection, and attachment. It's manipulative love bombing passed off as love. The elitist Bisset and Trintignant insult the deceased, invalidate the crime's utility, publicly gawk at the idiosyncratic instruments of the crime, and in turn mock the value of the detective's job in the process. They go a step further by coercing him into including them as principals in solving a case that they're prime suspects in - not because they're craftily trying to exonerate themselves, but because they crave involvement in a 'mystery' to give them a gossipy break of stimulation to divert their attention from the boredom of their vapid, unfulfilling lives. And as for the detective, well, he doesn't really care about any of this either (which is why it's permitted to occur at all), but he wants to pretend he does. This is a movie made by someone who knows this shtick has been done a million times over, and if you’re going to film the nth dimestore paperback mystery, you may as well allow the characters to treat its gravitas with the same lackadaisical temperament as the breezy spirit warrants. No one cares about the architect, so why should we? They only care about themselves, and inserting themselves into positions of surrogates to distract from everyday life, just as the audience is doing by watching or reading such programmatic trash.

The film's ethos is constantly felt in its blithe attitude, never allowing dramatic sincerity to oust the comic tone. A great example is the mid-film exchange between Mastroianni and Trintignant, which erupts into a yelling match that entertains the intimate artifice of shot-reverse-shot, emphasizing Trintignant's escalation at being placed in a position of vulnerability. But these bits of melodrama are continuously interrupted with zoom outs to medium shots of cartoonish interplay - complete with voice-tones rapidly shifting to provoke the other. Such alienating tactics seem planted to remind us of the irony that the very guy who laughed off murder (but takes petty city pronunciations seriously) would expect the same detective he taunted to stop the carnival when he's feeling at risk.. Your classic infantile 'everything's fair game until it's my turn to be teased' playground conflict. And of course Mastroianni can't help but float into a quasi-romantic subplot with a prime murder suspect/faux-femme fatale, as if the fatalism of the genre trappings humorously filters these non-characters into situations without their awareness or consent. They all think they're more complex, serious, and autonomous beings than they actually are, because the film and story reduce their worth from achieving that detail at every opportunity.

I suppose this is where I differ from Pauline Kael in my takeaway from the film - I don't think it's attempting to be a rich satire full of larger-than-life "glazed" characters, excitedly partaking in an exercise of suspense or romp. Rather, the focus is on exhibiting a milieu too tired and lost; uninspired to care, and unskilled to enliven their surroundings, in the manner they delude themselves into believing they can do. It can be a commentary on the insipid artifice of performing roles as actors, just as much as social and institutional roles (I did appreciate one of the more pointed, but still rather understated mirroring gags, where the late scene of the elite in the lockup resembled the earlier scene with the prostitutes in a similar scenario). I got a similar thing out of this as I do from the Paul Verhoeven vehicles that share its reflexive engagement with such material, only The Sunday Woman seems to be thinner by design, and not as skilled in venturing to extremities, or ambitious about balancing them (often reflecting the characters' investments and the genres' sincere heights) to deliver its purpose. This film appropriately takes a middling route of a shrug, because it's not about locating importance but implicitly about fruitlessly avoiding the lack of importance embedded in any of this. The project is a joke, but I suppose it needs to adopt a steadily simmering vibe to follow through on its dull safari of anti-humanist punchlines in order to reveal these vacancies. I have no idea what Aunt Peg is referring to by the 'ahead-of-its-time surprise ending' either (I must've missed the shock in the surprise, too) but I did love how the title of the film refers to something so inconsequential to any of the goings-on, that it serves as the ultimate punchline to what this film is 'about'.

Spoiler

The look of Mastroianni, emasculated and confused, as Bisset, a woman, leaves him in bed on a Sunday, off to a trivial tryst with Trintignant's trivial beau to talk about trivial things says everything about how the filmmaker sees this film and its character's trivial existences... the film's title indicates the least significant aspect of the least significant character in the least significant scene of an insignificant story.

sold out from the Radiance store. just over a month was all it took

For anyone looking for copies of the sold-out The Sunday Woman, Hamilton Books still has copies at $21.95.

We also have a small amount of stock on our site that came back from retail.

Watched this last night It was a lot funnier than I expected. It had me and my wife both going several times and would have easily passed the patented Kermodian "three laughs" test.

I'm curious to know whether Sophia Loren was ever attached this or there was a hope to cast her. I couldn't help but notice that Bisset was dressed up to look very Loren. Obviously Mastroianni was there too and they worked together numerous times. I've not yet watched the on-disc extras, so on the small chance it is mentioned there, I apologise.