In a sense what makes it anything but modern is that it doesn't go in for camp. This isn't a romcom, but a two handed character study of that wonderful 1970s-era variety.
And from a script point of view what makes it interesting is the ways it resists our expectations of structure. For instance, there's no sense of competition between Daniel and Alex. While each of them get frustrated with Bob and want more, neither of them tries to undermine the other. The two don't even meet until the very end, at which point they talk as friends of a sort, people with a shared experience.
As my old prof Hal Ackerman was always drilling into us, story is about conflict. But here the conflicts are at first with Bob, who refuses to give either of them what they really want, and ultimately with themselves, as they confront their expectations and choices.
Each character gets a moment along the way that seems unrelated to their plights or questions and yet ends up being essential. For Alex it's the experience of babysitting her friends' kids and watching one of them almost get hit by a car. For Daniel it's attending his nephew's bar mitzvah and remembering his own.
Both scenes seem almost random. You wonder where are we and why am I being shown this? And yet each offers a moment of reckoning for the main characters, an opportunity to step outside their own lives and see a bigger picture, whether of mortality, beauty or "the meaning" of life. The experiences don't leave them uninterested in Bob, but they do put him in a different position.
It's similar to that Christmas carol scene I wrote about yesterday from WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE..., a sort of queering of the narrative which disrupts the standard structural expectations in favor of unexpected beats that open onto a broader humanity.
The end of the film is even more transgressive, as Daniel suddenly breaks the fourth wall to talk to us about the things we're taught to believe as children that aren't true -- that you'll never enjoy being out in the world, that your childhood is the best part, or that you can't happily share a man.
There's no precedent for this moment in the film. This hasn't been FERRIS BUELLER. And yet it absolutely works, I think because once again it doesn't take its eye off what is essential to this film, its consideration of our complex, slippery, vulnerable humanity.
"All my life, I've been looking for somebody courageous, resourceful," Daniel's monologue ends. "He's not it. But something. We were something. 'I only came about my cough.'" It's just a few sentences, and yet emotionally dense and mysterious. Like catching glimpses of lovers in the fog, there's so much there and also so much for us to fill in.
For me both these films beg the question of the best way of landing key beats like the midpoint, climax or ending. Our first attempts may nail the structural expectations, but these films ask, What would it be like to go back and consider those moments again from a more intuitive angle? Is there another way of proceeding that is less linear perhaps but more resonant?
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One other thing to say about SUNDAY: it presents Daniel's relationship with Bob in a way so ordinary and non-dramatic you can't quite believe it was made in 1971. A great film.
