‘SUNSET’ IS BOLD FOLLOW-UP TO ‘SON OF SAUL’
JULI JAKAB STARS IN “SUNSET.”
Where does an artist go after Auschwitz? Laszlo Nemes, the director of the implacably sinister Hungarian drama “Sunset,” has had to grapple with the question as few others have. He won an Oscar and nearly every international film prize under the sun for his 2015 feature debut, “Son of Saul,” which plunged the viewer into a grimly convincing simulacrum of a Nazi death camp and, for its many admirers, delivered the last word on how a filmmaker should depict the unthinkable.
The radicalism of “Son of Saul” could be appreciated not just because it was so brutal and overwhelming but also because it was so strange and destabilizing. It restored a vital element of disorientation to a story that had grown all too familiar.
Disorientation is even more the order of the day in “Sunset,” in part because its historical moment exerts far less of a grip on the collective imagination. This is an easier movie to watch, insofar as we cannot hear the machinery of mass murder grinding away off-screen. But its peculiar dramatic alchemy — the way Nemes places his mad formal audacity in service of a tangled, perversely withholding narrative — makes it a rather more difficult one to absorb.
Scholars of the waning glory days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire will have something of an advantage. We are in Budapest in the 1910s, a world of white-lace finery and horse-drawn carriages that is rivaled only by its sister city, Vienna, as the apex of European wealth and cultural refinement. The movie’s first image is of a 20-year-old woman named Irisz (Juli Jakab), her eyes hidden by the brim of an enormous hat she’s trying on at Leiter’s, a high-end milliner’s shop.
The first reversal arrives within minutes: Irisz’s surname is Leiter, and she has come not to buy a hat but rather to apply for a job at the shop that her parents owned years ago before it burned down, taking them with it. Leiter’s has since been restored to its old splendor, and its oily new proprietor, Oszkar Brill (Vlad Ivanov), clearly thought highly enough of the name to keep it. But Brill has no interest in hiring Irisz and sends her away, setting a pattern for the sneering hostility and paranoia she will receive from nearly everyone she encounters.
Eventually, she finds out about a brother she never knew she had whose violent reputation — he is said to have murdered a count named Redey five years earlier — may explain the cruelty and suspicion that greet her.
By now it should be clear that Nemes, who wrote the script with Clara Royer and Matthieu Taponier, has little use for conventional explanations. But if individual scenes and subplots remain
dauntingly opaque, the overall arc of “Sunset” is clear enough. As Irisz moves from bustling streets and afternoon garden parties into an underworld of crime and conspiracy, she is not merely chasing the truth about her patrimony; she is our witness to the last gasp of European high decadence before it vanishes into the bloody maw of World War I.
At times, the twisty contours of the plot are illuminated with sudden clarity, particularly those involving Count Redey’s grieving widow (Julia Jakubowska) and the ugly truth about Leiter’s, which turns out to play a highly specific role in the city’s ruthlessly patriarchal order.
The last time we see Irisz, in a long tracking shot that brings the movie’s thesis to a “gotcha!” close, she fixes the camera with a flinty stare that could be interpreted as a wink or a rebuke — or a revelation. You never fear for Irisz in “Sunset.” You fear for the world she’s passed through and found sorely, tragically wanting.