1913 is a year that fascinates me. It was the last year of an order that reigned in Europe and the world for almost a century, established at the Congress of Vienna that had traced in 1814-15 the borders of Europe and the relations between the great powers of the time. Of course, it had been a century with many events – the 1848 revolutions, the emergence of new national states (Germany, Italy, Romania among them), conflicts and regional wars – yet Europe had been spared of major continental scale conflicts as the 30-year War or the Napoleonic wars had been in the previous centuries, and the balance between the great powers seemed relatively stable, also influenced by the relations between the royal and imperial families that reigned in many of the countries of the continent. Contradictions and conflicts were accumulating, while the more sophisticated classes benefited from a life style close to decadence. Europe had several cultural capitals – Paris, of course, but also Berlin, Vienna, Prague, or the newcomers Budapest and Bucharest – cities where the arts flourished in parallel with the underground rottenness. The fascination for this last moment of bourgeois tranquility and escapism that was 1913, a moment before the storms of the 20th century, is shared by many authors of books and movies. Hungarian director László Nemes, is the latest with his recent film ‘Sunset‘ / ‘Napszállta‘.
László Nemes also faces the ‘second film’ syndrome, which are suffering from the directors who have made an exceptional debut. After ‘Son of Saul‘ enjoyed an exuberant reception by critics and collected about all the major awards for foreign films (including the Academy Award and BAFTA for best foreign language film) three years ago, expectations are high. ‘Sunset‘ is undoubtedly an ambitious movie. Nemes chose the year 1913 to launch a warning about the contemporary period, similar in his views to the accumulation of contradictions, the differences between the styles and the levels of life of the social categories, but above all similar in ignoring the acute problems facing Europe today. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was less than a year after 1913 to be engulfed in WWI, and which would disappear in five years, is a metaphor for today’s Europe, another multinational empire suffering of escapism, ignoring the gathering problems or not finding the real solutions. In such times people seek their identity, so does the heroine of the film, Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), a young woman coming to Budapest in search of the truth about the death of her parents, about the fate of the hat store left to them in heritage, and about the destiny of her brother, whose existence she learns about, shrouded in a fog of mystery and fear.
László Nemes likes to put his audiences to test. With the story at hand he could have made of ‘Sunset‘ a Gothic mystery with elements of historical drama mixed with ‘horror’. These elements are present in the film, but the criminal intrigue does not seem to be the focus of the attention of the director (who is also co-scriptwriter). More important seems to him to be the ambience, an end-of-the-empire Budapest. The cinematography seems to be in tune with the name of the film, obscure lighting that leaves the feeling that night is permanently coming, which makes of the light of the few scenes shot in daylight to seem almost blinding. Part of the story is related to the hat making business, with the beautiful 1913 fashion creations that would make the English royal house of today jealous, a craft and symbol of a twilight world. The actors are superb, with Juli Jakab in the lead role combining the determination and defiance of social rules with an inner power that compensates for her fragility. Romanian star Vlad Ivanov is as good as always (I do not remember him acting a bad role in a movie or on stage ever), embodying Oszkár Brill, the hat store owner, a useless beauty factory, an apparently respectable institution, also hiding vices and dark stories between its walls. He speaks his role in Hungarian, and unfortunately I do not know this language well enough to judge whether he speaks impeccably or with some accent that may suggest a stranger in a cosmopolitan world.
‘Sunset‘ is a beautiful and interesting movie, but the lack of attention or decision in the narrative thread loses the spectators at some point, or at least, it lost me. The characters appear and disappear before they have been completely defined, the same situations are repeated with small variations, and many of the details of the story are not concluded or explained. I could not avoid a feeling of length and repetition, and the open end added another enigma without clarifying anything that has happened until then, which does in my opinion add another element of dissatisfaction. László Nemes does not need to prove anything, he already has made to himself on merit a name among the important filmmakers of today’s Hungary and Europe. He should now just pay more attention to his spectators.