Bad Take

One woman works at the municipal desk where Roman residents voice their grievances. The other at the speech therapy clinic in Naples. One listens; the other helps patients speak. Both work with the spoken word. Both are nearing retirement: the start of one long Sunday, instead of that weekday punching of the clock, inside offices, inside rooms. What was that weekly Sunday in their lives, if not an open space of truly creative activity, free from the office worker’s bane of unproductivity? If not a time for active listening, in the neighborhood, getting together at odd hours, an unplanned field of possibility? Away from that tame, sleep-walking environment of the pay check and the limits it places on one’s goals? By comparing the active, voluntary Sunday and the passive, enforced Sunday – and those who lived before the Sunday of Italian tradition and those after, this film attempts to speak all the languages of Sunday.