Radiance: The Sunday Woman (1975) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Radiance

British boutique label Radiance is just starting to make their presence known in the United States blu-ray community with their deluxe releases of Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and the upcoming world disc premiere of Kinji Fukusaku’s Yakuza Graveyard.  Setting their sights on Italian directors including but not limited to the renowned Elio Petri of The Working Class Goes to Heaven, their most recent person of interest is Don Camillo film series réalisateur Luigi Comencini and his sardonic social satire The Sunday Woman.  Springboarding from elements of the luxurious whodunit murder mystery and just a hint of giallo, The Sunday Woman starts out like a thriller before veering into snarky critiques of Italy’s upper echelon ala Elio Petri’s The Assassin (incidentally also starring legendary actor Marcello Mastroianni) in the leading role.

 
Handsy piggish sexist architect Garrone (Claudio Gora) is out and about Rome one day, leering at and groping women every chance he gets when he mysteriously turns up brutally murdered with a plaster phallic object ala A Clockwork Orange, leaving haute socialite Anna Carla Dosio (the incomparable Jaqueline Bisset) and her gay friend Massimo (Jean-Louis Trintignant) as the prime suspects.  As Commissioner Salvatore Santamaria (Marcello Mastroianni) mounts an investigation into the crime, utilizing the conventions of the whodunit Agatha Christie murder mystery, the film becomes a blistering critique of the social hierarchies dominating the Turin region while deconstructing the conventions of the whodunit to offer up something closer to uncategorizable sociopolitical farce.

 
Based on the novel of the same name by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini with additional screenwriting by Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli of Big Deal on Madonna Street and The Organizer, The Sunday Woman with its deliberately impenetrable title and nebulous motives is a wry observation of clashing classes with elements of the convoluted film noir labyrinthine narrative.  As more mercurial characters and double crossings start to crop up, the film starts becoming more and more like Mike Hodges’ Pulp where the conventions themselves start becoming subverted and it takes on an increasingly detached tone.  When it isn’t defying user expectations, The Sunday Woman also rests on the screen glamour of its two leads Bisset and Mastroianni who are simply dripping with sex appeal.
 
Lensed by the legendary cinematographer Luciano Tovoli of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger and Dario Argento’s Suspiria, the composed-for-television fullscreen dramedy (also offered in the cinematographer’s preferred theatrical ratio of 1.85:1) looks splendid.  As with most Italian thriller/loosely giallo fare, the film is a scenic picturesque tapestry of Italian luxury and high lifestyle, soaking up the glamour of the worlds lived in by the characters.  And where to begin with the score by the man who needs no introduction, Ennio Morricone.  One of (if not THE) greatest Italian film composers who ever lived, Morricone’s score for The Sunday Woman is laced with loose notes of the Hitchcockian thriller while also offering up Jazzy maneuvers that offsets the tone of the action.  Bisset and Mastroianni are at the top of their game playing off of one another’s larger-than-life screen presence while Jean-Louis Trintignant bravely navigates the then-controversial waters of portraying homosexuality onscreen.

 
Distributed by 20th Century Fox’s Italian branch, The Sunday Woman like Pulp before it is difficult to pin your finger on.  A tonally astray playing field of double-crossings, murders and one-up gamesmanship, the film presents a straightforward thriller from the outset only to use that skeleton for a trenchant, incisive chipping away at the glossy surface features of the bourgeoisie.  A movie content to put its feet up and fold its arms behind the head, the film’s languid pacing and almost carefree attitude has more of the markings of an absurdist joke than a tense crime thriller.  The kind of film only a director with such a deft understanding of the tightrope balance between comedy and drama could’ve made, sometimes channeling both at once, The Sunday Woman is ostensibly a genre film that proceeds to subvert and upend your understanding of what the genre really has to offer.  While it doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel, it is a charming bit of dark irony whose uncharted comic weathers are only just catching wind outside of Italy now.

--Andrew Kotwicki