Sunset (László Nemes, 2018)

Sunset is a film I quite like in theory. It has a relentless formal style from which it never swerves. It uses a personal story, rather minor in the grand historical scheme of things, as a kind of microcosm of global affairs and a class structure in flux. And perhaps most notably, writer-director László Nemes organizes our perception around a character whose motivations and allegiances are frequently shifting and often difficult to surmise.  All of this should lead to a film that is both stately and morally ambiguous, a replication of a bygone era intensified by the forward propulsion of its lead character's hermeneutic drive.

But there are some significant problems with Sunset, not least of them being Nemes' aggressive showboating as a director. He keeps the camera and the action centered on Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), adopting an almost Dardennes-like over-the-shoulder point of view that renders most mid- and background action a semi-distinct blur. But Nemes never lets us lose sight of the fact that there is lots of heavily art-directed business in the back, with multiple horse-drawn carriages and crowds in period dress and fireworks displays and hot air balloons and all manner of hard-to-coordinate stuff. Seldom has a film so insistently demanded our attention to its own difficult construction while simultaneously pretending not to want us to actually see the arduous effort. Sunset is as manicured and overstuffed as, say, an Aleksei German film, but cloaks itself in the cinematic language of off-the-cuff realism.

In light of this overdetermined tension between figure and ground, Nemes places most of his eggs in one basket: the performance and countenance of Jakab. Steely-eyed and square-jawed, the sort of woman for whom the adjective "handsome" seems appropriate and wholly non-pejorative, Jakab resembles the young Adrienne Barbeau. She acquits herself admirably, but the film ultimately lets her down. As I say, it is her drive, her pursuit of hidden, unpleasant truths, that gives Sunset its narrative engine. (In this regard, Nemes' film is a cousin to Michael Verhoeven's underrated The Nasty Girl.) But Sunset mistakes confusion with diffidence. Írisz is, in the fullest since, a milliner who never makes a hat. 

She comes to Budapest to work at the store that bears her name, one once owned by her deceased parents. She is first rebuffed, then cautiously taken in, by the Leiter store's current proprietor, Brill (Vlad Ivanov), and she proceeds to embark on a series of inquiries based on the notorious existence of the brother she never knew she had. But what should play as a set of conflicting desires tends to come across as a lack of affect in Írisz, a drift through situations that move the narrative along but do not correspond to logical human action. Does she want to join the Austro-Hungarian elite? Does she want to follow her brother's path and burn them all to the ground? Or is she some sort of double agent? Írisz's passivity and indecision, which is remarked upon by her brother's associates, is never really resolved. All that we know is that, for whatever reason, the youngest Leiter will not leave Budapest. She is there to accomplish something, to be a catalyst for social disruption that would have eventually happened even without her presence.

This could, one might argue, by Nemes' purpose. Írisz is there to expose, not to act per se. In this regard, Sunset and its shallow focus would have a kind of narrative analogue in that its fixation on an ostensible main character is really a bizarre foregrounding of exposition, with the "real" story happening around and behind her. But if this is the case, it's a strategy that makes Sunset an interesting failure more than anything else. The film is so consistent in following Írisz that her lack of an obvious (or less-than-obvious) agenda makes her feel less like a person and more like a formalist crutch. 

That's to say, rather than negotiating between Big History and the private realm, Nemes really just wanted to secure his viewers' attention by turning his camera into a female body, a placeholder, through which to view social change that might otherwise seem drab or pedantic. (Compare the reactions to Sunset with those that greeted Mike Leigh's Peterloo, a film that sort of has the opposite problem.) What Nemes give us is a film that piles on intrigue and questions of nationalism, along with a great deal of meticulous verisimilitude, that asks us to perceive Írisz as the "return of the repressed," but swirls around an absence. Despite appearances, Sunset is all hat and no head.