Mark Reviews Movies: SUNSET (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2019

A person has to know. That's part of the human condition. We have to search for the truth—or, at least, an acceptable facsimile of it. If the search is not for some greater discovery about the world, then it is at least for coming to some kind of understanding about onself.

That search for some kind of meaning is at the heart of Sunset. It follows a young woman's return to a home she never had the chance to know, and by the time she gets there, things have changed so much that there's barely a trace of her existence. She isn't even her own person in this place, really. She looks so much like her mother, who died when the young woman was 2 years old, that people stop and stare with a look of confusion, longing, and maybe even a little terror. It's one thing to believe you've seen a ghost. It's entirely different to have such a vision and realize that the specter is actually there—flesh and blood and bone and a face that hasn't been seen in decades.

Co-writer/director László Nemes' sophomore feature plays out entirely in that mood. The whole of the story is about the ghosts of the past haunting the present, as well as how that fear of and desire for those things and people of the past affect the course of the future. Nemes has made something of a fable about life in Budapest before the Great War, in which a young woman, whose identity and past are exclusively defined by people whom she never really met, bears witness to the corruption of the age. It's a time of great prosperity for some and of angry rebellion for others.

Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) is right in the middle of those two extremes. By blood, she's a part of both, but at the story's start, she only possesses a knowledge and an understanding of the prosperous side.

To quickly summarize what we learn in the film's first act, Írisz is the daughter of a pair of esteemed milliners. When she was but a toddler, a fire broke out in the parents' store, killing them both and leaving Írisz's inheritance in ruins. She was sent to live with a different family of hat-makers in a different city, where she learned the trade of that family and her own.

The story begins with all of this in the past—in 1913. Now, old enough to have her own life, Írisz has returned to Budapest to seek employment at her family's shop, which, since her absence, not only has returned to its former esteem but also has surpassed it. She answers a job opening at the shop, but Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov), the new proprietor, says he won't give her the job.

He does so, though, in such an indirect and long-winded way that it seem too suspicious—protecting himself or the shop or her. Something is amiss, and Brill isn't the first person who won't tell her anything, while simultaneously trying to get Írisz out of Budapest as quickly as possible.

The Leiter name means many things to many people in this city. Nemes, along with fellow screenwriters Clara Royer and Matthieu Taponier, treat Írisz's search as mystery, and the whole of the plot, slow and mostly uneventful (until one character is introduced, at which point the story sometimes veers into political and actual anarchy), is sustained by the gradual feeding of information. Some of that includes a forthcoming royal visit and the revelation that Írisz has a living relative, who is unknown to her and whom the upper-class people of Budapest would rather forget.

The film itself, though, is sustained by Nemes' devotion to keeping Írisz as the central focal point. The mystery of the story is fascinating in how it introduces potential allies who turn out to have other agendas, apparent foes who might be the only way for Írisz to learn the truth of her family, and its central question about a woman who possesses no true identity of her own.

Írisz intentionally is a blank slate of a character, who reminds people of her mother and, in the story's climax, is actually mistaken for a different member of her family. Jakab's performance, though, is always in the forefront. Nemes captures much of the action with the camera just over Jakab's shoulder or in extreme close-ups of her face. It's a wholly reactive performance, revealing a mind constantly piecing together a puzzle and, at the same time, figuring out what role she wants or needs to play in the political strife unfolding around her.

Nemes' technique offers up its own sense of mystery. The era and place are accurately re-created here, but with the camera close to Írisz, the act of gathering our bearings about each new locale becomes a little mystery to solve in its own right. There are secrets everywhere, from a hidden room in the hat shop, which has been closed off for decades, to a train depot, where an exclusive men-only club hides the true motives of violent men. No matter where Írisz finds herself on her journey, there is a constant, claustrophobic dread, simply because Nemes keeps the character between our view and the world. In that way, we are in harmony Írisz's confounded state of mind.

Sunset is a personal story that becomes deeply political. The truth of Írisz's family history reveals an undercurrent of resentment that, very shortly, will result in chaos that affects the entire world. The truth here isn't simple, and the consequences of learning it are a source of both freedom and imprisonment.

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