The Sunday Woman

As Americans we take our diversity for granted.  Whether its racial, religious or regional, with that much square footage to work with there are bound to be dramatic cultural differences.  But when it comes to other countries, we myopically lump them into one group.  French, Germans, Jamaicans, what have you, it’s a foreign concept to most of us that within these small geographic areas there could be just as many social and ethnic divisions.  But director Luigi Comencini’s The Sunday Woman (1975) is a satirical mystery built around that very thing: the sometimes ugly, sometimes comical class distinctions that divide Italian society, specifically in the city of Turin.

The murder of a lecherous architect winds up implicating a number of suspects in Commissioner Santamaria’s (Marcello Mastroianni) investigation.  The bored socialite (Jacqueline Bisset), closeted playboy (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and his clingy lover (Aldo Reggiani) all have sketchy alibis and sufficient motivation.  But so do a number of other figures circling around the periphery of the filthy rich.  The crime becomes a pastime for those who believe themselves above the law.  Meanwhile Santamaria is just as much a fish out of water, matching wits with polite society and clinging to his one clue:  the murder weapon, a vulgar stone phallus.

 

While The Sunday Woman certainly fits the mold of a classic mystery, its interests lie in other directions.  A clever, mean-spirited comedy of manners, Comencini’s film enjoys mocking the ignorance of all of its characters, but manages to still make them likable.  It’s certainly a jump into the deep end of cultural bias that only an Italian would completely understand, but the script (based on a successful novel by Carlo Fruttero) translates fairly well.  Class warfare is, unfortunately, a universal language, and The Sunday Woman sets a familiar stage.

 

Santamaria, himself an outsider to the tight-knit Turinese elite, becomes a source of fascination for Bisset’s character, who sees him as a curiously attractive novelty.  Meanwhile, Trintignant’s character, Campi, hides his homosexual tendencies to retain his room at the top…even if it results in his own destruction.  It’s a film that smirks at the audience and takes great pleasure it revealing our flaws.  That it just so happens to be Italianaudience under the microscope makes it that much more interesting.

 

Another choice release from Radiance Films, the limited edition (only 2000 copies) features a 2K restoration from the original negative, collector’s booklet, new interviews with screenwriter Giacomo Scarpelli, Italian cinema expert Richard Dyer and DP Luciano Tovoli and a short archival TV interview with Trintignant.