A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE – a film by Geordie Sabbagh – SPOILERS ⁓

Tracy (Meghan Heffern), significant other to unpublished novelist Adam Loule (Dylan Taylor), has made French toast for breakfast. She sets a plate of it in front of him and takes away a bowl of noodles, saying: “This is gross, you need to stop eating this. This is gonna kill you.” Adam, whose third novel has been unfinished for some time, responds that noodles are cheap and might be the modern writer’s cigarettes. He compliments her on the food, but doesn’t eat much of it. Adam has a father who thinks he should “man up” and get a paying job, and a younger brother who is a successful roofer and consequently is very popular with women. Both are large contributors to Adam’s feelings of inadequacy. Tracy tells him she believes in him, but it does not help.

Tracy goes to work and Adam heads to a the local coffee shop, where he is met by Emma (Melanie Scrofano) who introduces herself as Death, and tells him his time on earth is up and he should be happy about that. After his death (Emma explains), Tracy will have his book e-published and he will be recognized as one of the great novelists of his time. When Adam remains reluctant to die after learning this, Emma takes an instant liking to him. They spend the rest of the day together as she tries to make sense of why Adam wants so badly to continue living. In this she is much like the version of Death that appeared to Antonius Block in THE SEVENTH SEAL. (Adam does ask Emma if she’d be up for a game of chess, but she just snickers at that.)

In Bergman’s film, Block stands in front of an altar beneath images of Saints, tells Death that he has no objection to dying, and asks why God must “hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles.” He wonders: “How can we have faith in those who believe when we can’t have faith in ourselves?”

Next to a stained glass church window with Emma, Adam illustrates the difference between himself and Antonius.

DEATH: “Well, you must be really believing since I showed up.”
ADAM: “I always believed.”
DEATH: “Really? In this day and age? I’m surprised the Sermon on the Mount is still capturing the younger ones.”
ADAM: “It’s not the sermon that makes me believe.”

What does make him believe comes up later in the conversation. The focus of Adam’s faith is a passage from Luke (2:19): “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” He calls it the most beautifully written sentence he’s ever heard, and says it isn’t Christmas if he doesn’t hear that one sentence. (That version of the quote is from the King James Bible. Early in the film, Toronto’s Anglican Church of the Redeemer is conspicuous in the background as Emma and Adam walk and talk downtown.)

Emma can predict what will happen after Adam’s death, but says that free will makes such predictions impossible before he dies. She can accurately predict that Tracy will have his book published and also successfully promote it which implies that, after he dies, his influence on the lives of others must be fixed and immutable.

Given his reluctance to accept a guarantee of literary immortality, why does Adam still want to live, and why does he want to write the book? As Emma looks for answers to these questions we learn a lot about her, including how she died.

“I followed my fiancé from East Aurora outside Buffalo overseas after Pearl Harbor and became a nurse,” she explains. “A bomb blew up the hospital I was working in. I was 26.” The last film she saw before she died was CASABLANCA. Emma took the job as Death’s helper because she didn’t want Jimmy (her betrothed) to die afraid and alone She delayed her journey to the afterlife for him, but Jimmy made it through the war, and when it was his time to die fifty years later, he didn’t even recognize her.

Her stated purpose is simply to close Adam’s file and deliver his death. To prove her power, she flirts with a guy in a suit (Benjamin Ayres) who promptly keels over. She dismisses any parallel with Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. It’s not her job (she says) to convince Adam that life is worth living. At the same time, she admits to having a crush on Jimmy Stewart, which suggests that she likes Adam because he’s someone Stewart might have portrayed.

Her favourite book is Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon“.

Emma has never been inside the gates of Heaven or Hell, but offers some clues to the nature of things beyond the veil, referring to heaven as a mansion on a hill, and hell as a shack near an underpass. “…all i smell is cookies at the mansion and sweat at the shack,” she tells Adam, “but the music is better there. They play Black Sabbath, Cooper, all the good stuff. I don’t really care for Mel Tormé.” Then she adds: “People never just stay at either house”, so even the dead must sometimes need a change of scenery.

In a Roncesvalles Avenue bookstore, Adam locates the spot where his novels would (both alphabetically and symbolically) fit, somewhere between Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence and A Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The soundtrack is a soulful extension of the Etta James song from which the film gets its name. It includes two songs from Mike and the Censations (“Split Personality” and “I Need Your Lovin'”), three from Geater Davis (“I Can Hold My Own”, “Sweet Love”, and “I’ll Get By”), and seven more:

• Goin’ in Circles – The Electric Peanut Butter Company
• I Remember – The Turner Brothers
• Sure Know How to Love Me – Darando
• Doin’It Right – Mike James Kirkland
• Save Me – Of Gentlemen and Cowards
• It Would Be a Shame – Betty Padgett
• Born to Live With Heartache – Mary Love

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A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE can be streamed on TUBI.