SUNSET: mysteries in a dying empire

Right: Juli Jakab as Írisz in SUNSET.  Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

For the first hour-and-a-half of Sunset, I was convinced that I was watching the best movie of the year.  Sunset is a visual masterpiece but the story’s coherence and pacing slips away in the final act.

Set only months before the outbreak of World War I, anarchy is erupting as a response to corrupt, senile empires.  The young woman Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), who was sent to Trieste at age two when her parents died, returns to Budapest and to her parents’ prestigious millinery store.   That store – still hatmaker to the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – is now owned by Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov), who is threatened by her reappearance.

Írisz is determined to find out more about what happened to her parents, but she becomes entangled by one more mystery after another.  She encounters  a former family retainer who is mad, and an aristocratic widow who may be mad; they and some sympathetic milliners leak  the shocking snippets.  Soon she is surprised to learn that she has a sibling – but can she find him?  Then she finds out about a notorious murder – but what really happened and why?  She stumbles upon an anarchist plot – but against whom and when?  And an upcoming royal visit has a decidedly sinister side.

As Írisz insinuates herself in Brill’s squad of young female milliners, she plays detective, unspooling the web of mysteries.  While the story is focused on Írisz’ family secrets, Sunset is gripping.  When the story grows wider, into a royal perversion and an anarchist upheaval it gets less coherent and less compelling.

Sunset was written and directed by László Nemes, who burst into world cinema with the gripping, innovative and impossibly grim Son of Saul.  That film won the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.  Sunset’s cinematographer Mátyás Erdély won the American Society of Cinematographers Spotlight Award for Son of Saul.

From the painting of Budapest in the opening titles. Sunset is a feast for the eyes. I haven’t seen a film since Ida in which every frame is composed to be a stand alone piece of art. The color palette of the daytime scenes conjures a time that we know from sepia-tinged photos. The chiaroscuro in the nighttime scenes lit by early electricity and open flames is magnificent.

Right: Juli Jakab as Irisz Leiter in SUNSET.  Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Center: Evelin Dobos as Zelma, Vlad Ivanov as Oszkar Brill in SUNSET.  Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Center: Evelin Dobos as Zelma in SUN.SET.  Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Some have noted that the part of the always intense Írisz doesn’t offer much range for Juli Jakab.  But Jakab is able to carry this film in which she’s in every scene, and I admired her performance.

Ivanov is best known for the Romanian  masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters, Mr. Bebe, the sexually harrassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer.  Hopefully,  Ivanov’s star turn in Hier, which I reviewed for Cinequest, will get an American release.

Nemes, in partnership with his cinematographer Erdély is a peerless filmmaker, but he is not yet a peerless storyteller.  I still recommend Sunset, even with its flaws, for its uncommon artistry.

HIER: riddle, mystery, enigma, brilliant

Vlad Ivanov (left) in HIER

In the brilliant and original drama Hier, middle-aged Victor Ganz has built a successful global engineering enterprise.  He takes what he thinks is a quick trip to Morocco to quell an apparent hiccup in one of his construction projects.  But when he arrives, he finds that the problem with his project doesn’t exist after all, but a mysterious stranger appears and threatens him about something else altogether.  Decades before, Victor had worked in Morocco as an adventuresome young man; incomplete memories of that experience are revived and begin to obsess him.  He becomes a detective but doesn’t fully understand what he is looking for in his own past.

Soon Victor is immersed in puzzling déjà vu.  Is he going crazy?  Is he imagining something in his past or his present?  Who is the woman he is driven to find again?  And why does Victor keep getting beaten up like a human piñata?

Referring to Russian unpredictability, Winston Churchill said, ” It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”  He might have just watched Hier. as Victor’s confusion becomes ever more trippy.

Ganz is played by Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov in a tour de force.  As Ivanov ‘s Victor is more and more consumed by the puzzles,  he becomes increasingly perplexed, dogged, battered and exhausted.

Ivanov is best known for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters, Mr. Bebe, the sexually harrassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer.

This is a Hungarian film, but it takes place in Morocco, Some of the dialogue is in English, most is in subtitled French, with some in unsubtitled Arabic (because the protagonist is not fluent in Arabic).

The film’s original Hungarian title is Tegnap, the word for “Yesterday”; the international title is the French word for “yesterday”, Hier (a marketing mistake IMO).  Of course, the protagonist’s obsession is an episode in the past – yesterday – that he remembers and understands only in fragments.

Hier is an impressive first feature for writer-director Bálint Kenyeres. Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Hier, which is one of the world cinema highlights of the festival.

FEVER AT DAWN: romance, identity and a moral choice

FEVER AT DAWN
FEVER AT DAWN

The Hungarian drama Fever at Dawn is a little movie with an epic romance. Set just after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Hungarian invalids who survived the camps have been sent to convalesce in hospital camps in Sweden. A young patient, Miklos, gets a dire diagnosis and determines to find love once more before he dies. A half century before internet dating, he concocts a scheme to get himself in front of every sick Hungarian woman in Sweden. When he meets his potential soulmate Lili, a moral question rises to the surface – should he share his diagnosis with the woman he is courting?

Some Holocaust survivors experienced ambivalence about the very Jewish identity that led to yellow stars on their clothes and, essentially, targets on their backs. This ambivalence becomes a significant thread of Fever at Dawn and is addressed more explicitly than is common for Holocaust (or post-Holocaust) movies.

Don’t read too much about this movie before seeing it. There’s an unexpected nugget at the end.

I saw Fever at Dawn earlier this year at its US premiere at Cinequest.  It’s being featured at this years San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SJFF36), where you can see it at San Francisco’s Castro on July 26, at the Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater on July 28, and at CineArts in Palo Alto on July 29.

Cinequest: FEVER AT DAWN

FEVER AT DAWN
FEVER AT DAWN

The Hungarian drama Fever at Dawn is a little movie with an epic romance.  Set just after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps,  Hungarian invalids who survived the camps have been sent to convalesce in hospital camps in Sweden.  A young patient, Miklos, gets a dire diagnosis and determines to find love once more before he dies.  A half century before internet dating, he concocts a scheme to get himself in front of every sick Hungarian woman in Sweden.  When he meets his potential soulmate Lili, a moral question rises to the surface – should he share his diagnosis?

Some Holocaust survivors experienced ambivalence about the Jewish identity that led to yellow stars on their clothes and, essentially, targets on their backs.   This ambivalence becomes a significant thread of Fever at Dawn and is addressed more explicitly than usual for a Holocaust (or post-Holocaust)  movies.

Don’t read too much about this movie before seeing it.  There’s an unexpected nugget at the end.

Fever at Dawn’s US Premiere will be on March 2 at Cinequest, with additional Cinequest screenings on March 3, 7 and 9.

Cinequest: DEMIMONDE

DEMIMONDE
DEMIMONDE

Sex, intrigue and murder – the atmospheric Hungarian drama Demimonde has it all.  It’s just before World War I in Pest, and we meet a wealthy kept woman (Patricia Kovács), her longtime housekeeper (Dorka Gryllus) and the new maid (Laura Döbrösi). Indeed, the movie’s title describes the professional courtesan,  shamelessly successful as a professional mistress that she can dare to seek riskier and riskier gratification.  Mustering more poise, dignity and sexiness than anyone else,  she utterly flouts all the conventions of respectability.  I don’t need them to respect me, she says, I just need them to be fascinated.  Indeed, she fascinates so many of the characters, that the sexual entanglements pile up until there are grave consequences.

All of the characters are hungering for something – sex and status, lost love, new love, sustenance, amusement.  The three lead actresses and all the supporting cast are exceptionally good.  Director Attila Szász convincingly takes us to the period and keeps the surprises coming.

With all the misbehavior, someone is sure to be punished and, when that happens, Demimonde becomes operatic. It’s one of the most satisfyingly entertaining films at Cinequest, and it plays the festival on March 2, 3, 9 and 10.

Cinequest: Heavenly Shift

Heavenly Shift1The dark Hungarian comedy Heavenly Shift (Isteni mûszak) is deliriously funny.  A rogue ambulance crew gets kickbacks from a shady funeral director if the patient dies en route to the hospital.  Said undertaker also uses his coffin inventory for his human smuggling ring, and he makes his payoffs in a Chinese restaurant.  The ambulance driver is addicted to laughing gas and scolds everyone about the difference between samurai and ninja swords.  Then there’s the addict who lives in the subway and repeatedly slashes herself so she can jump the responding ambulance crew and steal their morphine.

The laughs are enhanced by spaghetti western music, complete with showdown-in-the-main-street power chords for dramatic confrontations.  The cast delivers wonderfully dead pan performances, especially Roland Rába (Question in Details in the 2011 Cinequest).  There’s an especially messy emergency tracheotomy in a produce market and a hysterically madcap runaway ambulance sequence near the end.

Now this is a DARK comedy – and if you don’t find the likes of Killer Joe, The Guard, Bernie and Headhunters really funny, then this may not be for you.  For cynics like me, the more noir the better, and I think Heavenly Shift is a freaking riot.

Heavenly Shift’s North American Premiere is March 7 at Cinequest, and it plays again on March 12 and 14.

Cinequest – Children of the Green Dragon: competing for a warehouse and the pizza girl

CHILDREN OF THE GREEN DRAGON

In Children of the Green Dragon, a hangdog Hungarian real estate agent must avoid getting fired by selling a rundown warehouse that is currently rented to a shady Chinese import company.  The Chinese watchman is tasked, for his part, to prevent the sale of the warehouse – or face an additional year of involuntary servitude.  Surprisingly, they bond.

This movie is about the  culture clash between the two guys.  Their relationship blossoms despite that and despite their competing job interests.  Then both become fascinated by an edgy pizza delivery woman.  It’s a funny and sweet little film.

The film is titled A Zold Sarkany Gyermekei in Hungarian.