Napszállta
László Nemes (2018)
The action is set in and the sun setting on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The time is 1913. The place is Budapest; Vienna plays a part in the story too. In a well-appointed city store, a young woman (Juli Jakab) tries on a succession of beautiful hats before telling the salesperson she’s not a customer but an applicant for a hat-making job. The interview that follows is stopped in its tracks when the candidate gives her name as Írisz Leiter. Leiter is also the name of the store; Írisz explains that she is the daughter of its former, now deceased owners. The surprises in this opening scene of László Nemes’s new film are promising but not a sign of things to come. Sunset is lethally repetitive.
Although Leiter’s new owner (Vlad Ivanov) doesn’t want Írisz on his staff, it’s not long before she’s back at the store and it remains her base throughout. The place is essential to Nemes’s scheme too: he uses millinery to epitomise the soon-to-end belle époque. The mayhem and violence that lurk in the streets outside the elegant hat shop lie in wait on a much larger scale in 1914. It’s not long either before the heroine is searching Budapest for a brother of whose existence she was previously unaware and the director is visualising the action from her point of view. Just as in Son of Saul (2015), their previous collaboration, Nemes and his cinematographer Mátyás Erdély follow the main character with a hand-held camera: the audience thereby shares in the discovery of what’s round the next corner. The effect is different here, though. What Írisz finds rarely has the shocking impact of what confronts Saul. Besides, since Nemes has used the technique before, the viewer is much more aware of it as just that – a technique. I naturally pricked up my ears at a sequence in Sunset in which a fortune-teller is heard speaking the words of T S Eliot’s tarot-reader Madame Sosostris but this too is Nemes repeating himself: he referenced The Waste Land in his 2007 short With a Little Patience (see note on Son of Saul). Other characters keep warning Írisz not to pursue her search and she keeps disobeying their advice, to monotonous effect. A for-men-only motif in the narrative builds to an episode in which Írisz pretends to be a man. In the film’s final shot, she stares into the camera from a Great War dugout. It’s been a long (142-minute) and tedious journey getting there.
Tricia Tuttle, this year’s artistic director for the London Film Festival, introduced László Nemes and Juli Jakab (who lacks the range and variety needed to keep us interested in Írisz) ahead of this LFF screening. Tuttle described Sunset as an ‘astonishing’ achievement for what is only Nemes’s second feature. The film is a precocious piece of work but not in a good way. It’s remarkable how quickly this writer-director (he did the screenplay with Clara Royer and Matthieu Taponier) has descended into heavyweight turgidity. Sunset sometimes comes across as a near-parody of arthouse cinema tropes: for example, whenever one character asks of another a question you’d like the answer to, it’s a safe bet none will be forthcoming and that Nemes will simply move on without the questioner reacting to the lack of response. Now that he’s got it out of his system, it’s to be hoped this film proves a mere blip in László Nemes’s career. At least he did the right thing in correcting Tricia Tuttle when she told us Son of Saul won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Nemes’s amiable but firm amendment – Son of Saul won the Cannes Grand Prix – prompted a casual, same-difference reaction from Tuttle. The moral of the story: if you’re in charge of a major international film festival but don’t think movie awards are worth winning, don’t bother mentioning them; if you do mention them, get the facts right.
16 October 2018
