Sunset (2019): Twilight of the Old Order

Sunset (original title: Napszálita), the new movie by Hungarian auteur-director László Nemes is an audacious, beautiful, moody and noirish take on the period-mystery/costume drama/ historical fiction film. It is both gorgeous and intriguing.  At the same time, it is dark and foreboding.  Set in 1913 Budapest – the thriving co-capital of the creaky yet glamorous Austro-Hungarian Empire – the picture is a study in contrasts, taking us from the salons of the rich and the royal to the dark, sweaty, torchlit streets of the dispossessed and discontented. 

As the film commences, a painting of a Budapest street fills the screen, accompanied by serious, regret-tinged music – from Schubert’s Death of a Maiden, as it turns out. The street scene slowly darkens from late afternoon to dusk, then to a lovely, late sunset as the opening credits scroll across. An intertitle sets the place and time, then out of darkness we first hear female voices and soon see a young woman’s face behind a black veil. She’s at a high-class hat shop.

The young woman is Irisz (Juli Jakab), and this will be her story. Irisz has just returned to Budapest from Trieste to seek employment at Leiter the city’s most elite millinery shop, formerly owned by her family. For reasons that are strangely mystifying at first, she is coolly denied satisfaction and told by the new owner Oszkar Brill (Vlad Ivanov) it would be best if she would just go away.

But Irisz, an orphan, isn’t just looking for employment, she is trying to find herself and understand her place in the world. Connecting with her birthplace and the former family business is, she believes, all she has to go on.  Since she was sent away as a toddler after her parents died, Irisz has been gone for twenty years, believing all the while that she was alone in the world. So when she discovers that she may have an older brother, Kalman, she determines to stay and find him.  Kalman is a violent, evil man who hasn’t been seen for years, she’s told. But no amount of dire warning, cajoling, co-opting or possible danger will deter her from her quest – one that leads her down forbidding alleyways into the dark underbelly of the city and the world it represents.

All this is a setup for a story that personalizes and presages the violent fall of

what was then considered the preeminent civilization of the modern world. It’s no accident that much of the story centers on the Leiter shop - where the royal and the wealthy shop for pricey, pretty, high-fashion hats. Somewhere along the way, someone remarks that for decades, Leiter has “represented the peak of civilization.”  Yet, there’s a sense early on, before we know very much, that something is not quite right there. Later, someone else opines that “the horror of the world hides behind these pretty things.” The denizens of this polarized world are unaware that a great conflagration - which will bring with it the death of millions, the break-up of the Empire, and the destruction of old world culture generally, as well as the rise of communism and fascism, increasing antisemitism, the holocaust and, eventually, the Second World War -  is just months away. But we are aware. In fact, the knowledge that we are watching the sunset of an era and indeed of an entire world suffuses our understanding and appreciation of the film.

Is there a message here? Nemes, the director, who also cowrote the screenplay, says “My deep European roots have pushed me to wonder about the age we live in now and the ages of our forefathers, how thin the veneer of civilization can be, and what lies beyond.”

There are three things that make Sunset a special movie and one to seek out: First and foremost is the relatively unknown actress Juli Jakab as the protagonist, Irisz Leiter. She is in nearly every frame of the movie, often in screen filling close-up. And with her wide, curious, persistent eyes and unwavering determination, she is captivating. It’s not her general good looks, for among the dozen or so attractive young women working as milliners and sales staff at Leiter, she is far from the most beautiful.  It’s her seriousness and personal charisma, along with her character’s headstrong quest for answers, that carry the film.  The camera can’t get enough of her, and neither can we.

Then there are the fascinating and effective photographic techniques employed by director Nemes and his cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, throughout the picture. Nemes and Erdely bring us directly into the subjective experience of their protagonist through immersive techniques honed in their previous film, Son of Saul (2015).  That film was a brilliant but difficult to watch tale of an obsessed inmate at the Auschwitz death camp; whereas Sunset is, thankfully, a costume drama and mystery set in a very different milieu. And yet the cinematography pulls us into the picture’s environment in similar ways.

There are loads of extreme close-ups, often of Irisz but of other characters too. When she is moving, whether in a room, or down a stairway and/or through a crowded street, the camera follows so closely that we experience the world much as she does; sometimes it seemingly becomes her eyes, so we see what she sees as she sees it.  These effects are augmented by meticulous choreography, especially vivid in street scenes - as Irisz weaves her way through the crowds, a mixture of genteel carriages and throngs of the proletarian hoi polloi – along with a vivid and sometimes cacophonous audio track: horse hooves, wagon wheels, hammers and a multitude of voices – talking, shouting, hawking newspapers, and such. Sunset also employs the use of ultra-sharp focus on Irisz, with a contrasting blurred background, isolating her at the center of our attention. This is sometimes so sharp that it looks almost as if the actress was filmed in front of a blue screen. These stylistic approaches bring us closer to Irisz’s subjective experience, rather than some overarching objective reality – all of which adds to the sense of mystery that makes her quest interesting.

The third aspect of Sunset that makes it enthralling is the overall look of the film. The sets are just perfect – lush, detailed interiors; beautiful clothes – and stunning hats, of course – on beautiful ladies; dark foreboding alleys and torchlit gatherings; one evocative image after another. Highlighting all this is Erdely’s use of enriched color tones in his filming. This is a movie where the use of actual filmstock rather than digital imaging really shows to its advantage. The interiors are imbued with a warm, almost amber light which gives this color movie an almost sepia-toned effect; while the daytime outdoor scenes are suffused with a bright yellow light that makes them strangely both vivid and of another era. All this is quite gorgeous.

 Nemes has said that he was trying to present his story in a more experiential way than typical narrative films, to draw viewers in without spoon-feeding us every detail or an easy overarching takeaway.   “I thought we could achieve more by giving a glimpse of a world up close and not trying to fully uncover it. The imagination of the viewer would do the rest.”  In this, I think he largely succeeds.  But in focusing on technique as much as he does, he’s a bit like a kid with a new toy – he overdoes it. This being only his sophomore feature, perhaps the heavy praise for his first, Son of Saul, and its use of many of the immersive techniques I’ve just described has gone to his head. Or maybe it was the increased expectations from his backers or the vastly increased budget he had to work with this time out. Whatever the reason, as visually beautiful, thematically ambitious and cinematically audacious as Sunset clearly is, it is also too long at two hours twenty-two minutes. A tight two hours would have worked better.

Still, Sunset has a lot going for it, and despite being somewhat overstuffed, I have to recommend it. This is a dark, mysterious, provocative, sumptuous film, well worth your time. László Nemes is definitely a director to watch. And actress Juli Jakob, too.

2 hours 22 minutes.

Grade: B+/A-

Now playing in New York City and L.A.; Rolling out to select theaters nationwide beginning March 29, e.g. San Francisco on 3/29/19 and Berkeley, Ca on 4/5/19.