Sun­set

Hun­gar­i­an direc­tor Lás­zló Nemes arrived from out of the blue when his debut fea­ture Son of Saul was dropped into the 2015 Cannes com­pe­ti­tion line-up like it was no big thing. It’s a sin­gu­lar, bold ini­tial mis­sive which dares to take its cam­eras into a haunt­ing­ly detailed recre­ation of the Nazi death camps, shot almost like an RPG com­put­er game, albeit from behind the main sub­ject rather than adopt­ing his POV.

The film was a cer­ti­fi­able hit, but it soon became a talk­ing point, as some ques­tioned whether its tech­ni­cal rigour over­shad­owed the sub­stance of its daunt­ing sub­ject mat­ter, and also whether this sen­so­ry-dri­ven, expe­ri­en­tial mode of film­mak­ing was the cor­rect fit for mate­r­i­al that needs to be han­dled with kid gloves.

Nemes sticks to his for­mal guns with a less his­tor­i­cal­ly con­tro­ver­sial fol­low-up that’s equal parts daz­zling and baf­fling. Sun­set takes place in a rapid­ly indus­tri­al­is­ing Budapest of the 1910s as the shad­ow of war hangs over Europe. The film quite lit­er­al­ly fol­lows des­ti­tute milliner Írisz Leit­er (a fab­u­lous, steely turn from Juli Jakab, who is in vir­tu­al­ly every shot), as she returns to her home­town from Tri­este in an attempt to untan­gle the roots of her rot­ten fam­i­ly tree. Her par­ents were killed in a fire when she was aged two, she was put up for adop­tion and, as such, she has many ques­tions about who she is and where she came from. There may even be an estranged broth­er lurk­ing in the shadows.

The family’s opu­lent hat empo­ri­um, Leiter’s, was ced­ed to Vlad Ivanov’s Oszkár Brill, who awk­ward­ly wel­comes Írisz back to her spir­i­tu­al home, but advis­es she leave imme­di­ate­ly as if he knows of some­thing ter­ri­ble sit­ting on the hori­zon. It would be futile to relate any more details of its byzan­tine and addic­tive­ly com­pelling plot line, just to say that the unshak­able, unsmil­ing, unstop­pable Írisz shares more than a few traits with mod­ern noir sleuths like Ray­mond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

This is an ultra-com­pelling page turn­er of a film in which each scene deliv­ers us to the next crumb in the wind­ing trail. It’s more like a sun­rise than sun­set, as Írisz moves from a state of total dark­ness to one where she is grad­u­al­ly bathed in the light of per­son­al knowl­edge – how­ev­er sin­is­ter and vio­lent that occa­sion­al­ly may be.

It’s admirable that Nemes has made a film with the inces­sant momen­tum of a well-oiled Singer sewing machine as it clacks along at a relent­less pace. He attempts to place us in the shoes of his hero­ine. Some­times it works, such as when dia­logue from sur­round­ing per­sons fades in or muf­fles out as she pass­es by. Yet the plot does rely too heav­i­ly on Írisz over­hear­ing many pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, which feels like Nemes and his co-writ­ers Clara Roy­er and Matthieu Taponier are cheat­ing both them­selves and the audience.

Even­tu­al­ly, it’s the mode of the telling which becomes more inter­est­ing than the sto­ry itself. At about the half way point, there’s a scene which appears to dou­ble back on much that has come before it, but the film car­ries on regard­less. While Nemes appeals to the view­er to just come along for the wild ride, more and more of these odd moments stack up, as if you’re being pun­ished for try­ing to fol­low all the bob­bing and weav­ing. Two-and-a-half hours pos­i­tive­ly flies by, but after the fact, when you’re done swoon­ing over this gor­geous object (and the many, many extra­or­di­nary exam­ples of head­wear on show), it’s these strange lit­tle plot holes which stick in the craw.