Weak End

By J. C.

THE SUNDAY WOMAN

Directed by LUIGI COMENCINI

Screenplay by AGENORE INCROCCI and FURIO SCARPELLI

An aging, disreputable and thoroughly disagreeable architect is done in, bludgeoned to death with a stone phallus. Almost everyone questioned by Inspector Santamaria (Marcello Mastroianni) has a fair disposition for murder and a shaky alibi. Nobody liked the recently deceased much, but snobbism is an unpersuasive reason for murder. The inspector, then, must search out not only a culprit but a motive.

The Sunday Woman is a double-barreled puzzle, about which one does not know whodunit and one does not care either. The movie, steadfastly hare brained, has an unreasonably attractive cast: Jacqueline Bisset, elegant and wry as a bored member of Turin high society; Jean-Louis Trintignant, absorbed and enigmatic all the way through the part of a bisexual aristocrat. Mastroianni continues to be as relaxed as a sleep walker, as unruffled as a cat on the prowl. His shrugs are funnier than the dialogue he is given, and he employs them defensively, to good effect.

The ennui of the mystery is relieved, on occasion, by quick intravenous jabs of humor. At one point, Trintignant yells at a demanding male lover, "I gave up women because they're ball breakers -- but you're worse!" A beleaguered civil servant, his massive family wedged into a small car for vacation, wonders if a last-minute phone call concerned his ailing mother-in-law; then he hears the old lady pipe up "I'm here" from somewhere in the crowd between the back seat and the trunk. The Sunday Woman does not contain enough of these modest jokes to call them saving graces. They are more like simple amenities.

J. C.

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