Sunset [Napszállta] **** (2018, Juli Jakab, Vlad Ivanov, Tom Pilath, Susanne Wuest, Evelin Dobos) – Movie Review

Writer-director László Nemes’s Sunset [Napszállta] is the most challenging film of the 2018 London Film Festival – challenging to understand, challenging to stay awake, challenging to stay the course, oh and did I say challenging to understand?

Juli Jakab stars as the grim-faced, determined, stoical young heroine Irisz Leiter, who arrives in the Hungarian capital of Budapest in 1913 to apply for a job as a milliner at the legendary hat store that belonged to her late parents. But she is sent on her way by the polite but stern and sombre new owner, Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov).

Irisz is strong and fearless. Does she represent the new order? Juli Jakab plays her perfectly, with relatively little dialogue to go on. In one sense Sunset is a coming-of-age drama as a tentative, uncommunicative girl comes to the big city and matures into being a strong and fearless young woman. But that is not the story, certainly not at all the whole story that Nemes wants to tell.

Irisz refuses to be intimidated and go back to her home town again, and then she is confronted by a man looking for her supposedly dead brother Kálmán Leiter, which sets her off on an endless, dangerous quest to find him. Meanwhile the Leiter hat store is preparing to host royal guests, The Prince (Tom Pilath) and The Princess (Susanne Wuest).

Refusing to leave the city, the young woman follows Kálmán’s tracks, her only link to a lost past. Her quest brings her on a threatening trail through the dark streets of Budapest, where only the Leiter hat store shines brightly and beautifully. The hats are incredible, by the way, but that isn’t really the point, though the film does start with Irisz trying on hats. It is one of the great hat movies.

Nemes’s command of cinema is brilliant – quite dazzling  – as the camera relentlessly follows Juli Jakab’s tracks in one brio long take after another. The 1913 Budapest is staggeringly and vibrantly brought to life in huge crowd scene re-creations with amazing production design (by László Rajk) and stunning cinematography (by Mátyás Erdély). The film has a grand formal beauty. It looks incredibly expensive to make, though it cost only 8,900,000 Euro.

[Spoiler alert] As it is 1913 Europe, it is no surprise that Sunset portrays the last gasp of the old world on the eve of its downfall, along with its royals and, presumably, hat stores. The film ends up in the bloodshed of the trenches of World War One, and ends on one of the most peculiar final images, as enigmatic, maybe impenetrable, as the rest of the film. This is the European art film in full bloom, flourishing still, though possibly on the eve of its downfall too.

It is hard to say that you enjoyed Sunset, though it is easy to admire it, but it is just as hard to understand it, at least fully. Nobody, or at least nobody with taste or a brain, complained about that in a Tarkovsky movie. So nobody need complain about that in Sunset. It stays in the mind long afterwards, and you have time then to ponder its meaning or meanings.

Nemes’s previous film was the Oscar-winning Son of Saul, and Sunset shares thematic and stylistic elements with that masterwork.

Sunset is a nominee as Best Film in the Official Competition at the 2018 London Film Festival. I could see it having a good chance of winning. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival 2018, failing to win the Golden Lion.

Sunset is Hungary’s submission for the Foreign Language Film Award of the 91st Oscars and it premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 3 September 2018, followed by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in Canada on 8 September 2018. A total of 87 films will contend for Best Foreign Language Feature this year.

It was shot Budapest, and Iszkaszentgyörgy, Hungary.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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