The Sunday Woman — The Sunday Woman(Blu Ray)

Here we have a new Blu- ray release of Luigi Comencini’s well-regarded 1970’s comedy thriller, ‘The Sunday Woman’ from the fine folks at Radiance Films. Featuring a new 2k scan of the picture,  as well as a good selection of extras to boot.

Comencini is most closely associated with the genre of commedia all’italiana, a satirical comedy outgrowth of the Italian neo-realist tradition to which he contributed films such as ‘Everybody Go Home’ (1960) and ‘Traffic Jam’ (1977)  ‘The Sunday Woman’ is generally not included among the commedia titles.  Although witty and ironical in its depiction of upper-middle-class Turin society, the movie’s thriller elements take precedence.

‘The Sunday Woman’ concerns the efforts of Police Commissioner Salvatore Santamaria (Marcello Mastroianni) to solve the murder of a formerly feted but now generally disliked architect, Garrone (Claudio Gora) and the pool of suspects, drawn from members of Turin’s haute bourgeoisie and their associates.  The film’s title is alluded to in a blink-and-you-’ll-miss-it moment.  Sunday is the arranged day for Santamaria’s mistress to visit.  At the end of the film Santamaria becomes someone else’s Sunday arrangement with appearances and etiquette dominating the rest of the woman’s time.  

Wikipedia’s entry on the film describes its plotline as concerning ‘the murders of two marginal individuals who had associated with the city’s elite’.  This is fine as far as it goes but somewhat misleading as it paints a picture of poshos rubbing shoulders with the demi-monde. 
The section of society depicted is actually pretty monolithic.  Gerrone, is portrayed as an unpleasant lecher and, it is implied, a child molester has been responsible for his own ostracization from upper-middle-class society. 

The second murder victim, Lello Riviera, a young municipal clerk and boyfriend of one of the major suspects, may be lower born but is both presentable and respectable. 

As a thriller ‘The Sunday Woman’ is almost the antithesis of the kind of movie non-Italian audiences associate with the term giallo.  Gialli usually depicts their murders explicitly and in your face, their characters are often rather flatly defined.  Comencini deploys his skill with comedy to create well-rounded characters who interact in witty, revealing but still realistic ways.  The gruesome results of the killings are portrayed but the murders themselves are elided.  What gialli, themselves often set among Italy’s well-to-do, do have in common with ‘The Sunday Woman’ is the portrayal of that class of society as elegant, somewhat louche and also cynical and remote. 

The film benefits hugely from Luciano Tovoli’s superb camera work.  Tovoli won plaudits in the latter half of the seventies for his deliberate, forensic photography on Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’ (1975) and his expressionistic, rococo compositions for Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ (1977).  His work for Comencini again displays his talent for tailoring his approach to and embellishing his directors’ visions.  Less obviously stylized and more workaday than his work with these other films Tovoli’s photography is more attuned to the characters rather than atmospherics or thematic concerns.  
Tovoli and Comencini combine their talents on a couple of set pieces.  The second which details Riviera’s murder when he becomes lost in the city’s furniture flea market has the claustrophobic approach of many similar passages in gialli and related thriller formats.  The first in which seemingly dozens of prostitutes and their clients are expelled by the police from a suspect’s estate has a curious circular rhythm while being played for laughs and has nothing in common at all with Tovoli’s work for either Antonioni or Argento.  

The performances are uniformly excellent.  As Santamaria Marcello Mastroianni is his usual suave self, somewhat less tortured than in many roles as his character’s energies are mostly directed towards professional ends.  Jean-Louis Trintignant also excels as the chief suspect, the confident, dynamic but closeted gay Massimo Campi.  The third major star is Jacqueline Bisset who manages the difficult task of suggesting human dimensions behind the sphinx-like façade of her permanently collected aristocrat, Anna Carla Dosio.  The film’s stand-out performance is from Aldo Reggiani as Campi’s younger boyfriend, Lello Riviera.  On the surface the smartly attired Lello appears to be a fluttery stereotype. However, the character’s determination to put himself in harm’s way to prove his love for Massimo, who for various reasons keeps him at arm’s length, breaks your heart. ‘The Sunday Woman’ is a film that grips you from the off, is effortlessly engaging and has a sophisticated lightness that belies its rather dark subject matter.

 

Radiance has presented ‘The Sunday Woman’ here in a 2K restoration from the original negative in two versions; the original (1.33.1) and an alternative widescreen (1.85.1) presentation.  The sound is in original uncompressed mono PCM audio. This Blu-ray is less packed with extras than some other Radiance releases but what there is is worthwhile.  Besides a contemporary trailer that also seems to have been restored, there are four other extras.  There is a short (4 minutes) contemporary interview (1976) with Trintignant discussing the film for French TV.  A newly filmed interview (2022) has film critic and Italian cinema expert Richard Dyer discuss the movie’s approach to gay characterization and also Comencini’s decision to cast non-Italian stars in roles where their ‘foreignness’ serves as a marker for their characters’ ‘otherness’ among the Turin bourgeoisie (French Trintignant as gay Campi and Anglo-French Bisset as patrician Anna Carla respectively) (18 mins)).  The most informative extras are an archival interview from 2008 with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (22 mins) and a detailed account by academic and screenwriter Giacomo Scarpelli of his father, Furio Scarpelli’s collaboration with writing partner Agenore Incrocci on numerous commedia all’italiana films and of their work on ‘The Sunday Woman’ with Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini adapting the latter writers’ acclaimed novel of the same name (36 mins, 2022).  

The disc also comes with a twenty-four-page booklet.  It contains essays by critics Mariangela Sansone (The Sunday Woman) (2022) and Gerard LeGrand (A Fable Without Morality) (originally published in Positif in 1976) along with movie credits and details about the transfer and Blu-ray release. 

With this release, Radiance has reissued another excellent movie- with a good selection of extras, which really helps to contextualize it for new audiences.