Sunset (Napszállta)

Having seen Laszlo Nemes's first feature film, Son of Saul, which was superb, I was excited to see Sunset, his new release. Unfortunately, my excitement was misplaced.

Sunset is set in 1913 in Budapest. A young woman, Irisz, turns up at a prosperous hat emporium to ask for a job, revealing that she trained in hat making in Trieste and is the daughter of the original owners of the Budapest hat business, who, we eventually discover, died in a fire.

The new owner first tells her she cannot have a job, then puts her up in the business's hostel for milliners, where she is disturbed in the night, not by bed bugs as the man who runs the place warns her she will be, but by a maniac called Gaspar, who then leaps out the window, setting the curtains on fire as he goes.

Irisz then discovers that she has a brother who is some kind of brigand. She sets off to find out more, after an encounter with a drug-addled countess, whose husband was murdered by said brother.

Irisz witnesses the countess's rape by a dastardly Austrian, and then is almost raped herself by her brother's colleagues. There is a great deal of rattling about in carriages drawn by wild horses and hordes of people running through streets carrying flaming torches. There is frantic rowing across rivers and general mayhem, all intercut with the contrasting calm of the hat salon itself - although it is actually the centre of corruption, where young milliners are sold off each year to barefooted and depraved Austrian princelings.

In Son of Saul, Nemes filmed with an intensely close focus on the protagonist, leaving everything not actually immediately around that character a dreadful blur. This made sense in a death camp and seemed to me to be a way of expressing the impossibility of surviving such a hell without screening out as much as possible from your mind. However, it turns out that this is just how Nemes films, regardless of whether his subject is the greatest crime ever committed by humanity or just a melodrama about a hat business. In Sunset, the cameraman runs after Irisz, keeping her - or the back of her neck - almost constantly in tight focus, while turn of the century Budapest rushes by in a blur. To discover that the blurring in Son of Saul was not a deliberate choice, intended to indicate horror, but just a stylistic tick rather undermines my admiration for that film.

Nemes attempts to link his ridiculous story to the decline - or "sunset" - of the Habsburg empire and turn of the century European civilisation. In the final scene, we see Irisz, now a boy (??!?), alone in the trenches of World War One. She stares at the camera with exactly the same expression she has worn throughout the film. I stared back, furious at being tricked into watching such a piece of twaddle.

As a positive, the hats are nice - but so are the hats in My Fair Lady, and that film is much more fun. And if you want to see a really enjoyable Hungarian melodrama, I would suggest Kincsem, rather than Sunset. The great joy of Kincsem, is that it has absolutely no pretensions. It is entertaining rubbish, whereas Sunset thinks it is significant and ends up being unentertaining and total rubbish to boot.

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

There are some very good things about this film. One is that someone pedantic was in charge of the titles and as a result the rule that prepositions are not capitalised is observed in the film's name onscreen. Another - the one that carries the film almost entirely - is Frances McDormand's performance. She excels as a tough woman who has had enough and takes on authority and anyone else who stands in her way.

What I didn't like about the film though was its uneven tone. Was it a black comedy? Was it a whodunnit? Was it a tearjerker? In the end, it was more of a cartoon, with the characters all drawn very, very broad.

There was Woody Harrelson, the good father and family man, with the emetically honey-lit wife and two ickle-pickle daughters - there was nothing believable about anything in this peculiarly luxurious - given the guy was on a policeman's salary - set-up, including the fact that Harrelson looked fatter and more glowing than I've ever seen him before, yet was supposed to be wasting very swiftly away. There was the idiot police officer who we were supposed to believe had a heart of gold, despite being a very violent thug. There was the dwarf who definitely had a heart of gold,  and the attractive black woman and attractive black man, who,  as soon as they saw each other ,understood that unwritten segregation laws meant that they must end up together and never consider the possibility of any kind of mixed race relationship.

Worst of all, from my point of view as a female, while there was a strong lead female character - McDormand - the rest of the female characters were excruciating. The writer of this film appears to think that the majority of womankind are laughable air heads - viz the girl at the agency that rents out billboards,  McDormand's ex-husband's new girlfriend, and Woody Harrelson's wife, who, while not totally ditzy is essentially a cypher, (and also played pretty embarrassingly badly by Abby Cornish, but what could she do with that part, to be fair?) - or alcoholic son-castrators. Even the main character rather loses the moral high ground, when she decides to throw half a dozen Molotov cocktails at the town's police station without making absolutely sure that no one is still inside.

But it may be that the world of the film is one that has no morality. This would certainly help explain the ending, when Frances McDormand sets off with the idiot police officer, (who we are also encouraged to see as not that bad, even though we have been told he beats up black people and we have watched him kick and punch one character, throw him out of a second storey window and then dash downstairs, socking a receptionist in the jaw on the way, and continue kicking his victim in the middle of the town's main street) on what may or may not be a journey of possibly misplaced vengeance.  

I suspect the film's mingling of jocularity and violence may be something that has been borrowed from Tarantino. I've never been able to bring myself to watch one of Tarantino's films, because I can't look at violence. Therefore, I'm totally unqualified to comment on their virtues or the lack of them. I can only say that, while I never got bored during Three Billboards, I did have to look away a lot.  Afterwards I found it hard to work out how its mix of violence and grief and cartoon narrative, (with a tiny dose of possibly tongue-in -cheek schmaltz in the scenes involving Harrelson's family) really ended up knitting into a coherent whole. But, as someone who could never watch Tom and Jerry, because those awful moments when something heavy got smashed down on a cartoon creature's head made me wince too much, I think I may be way out of step with the great majority of cinemagoers. Despite being riveted by Frances McDormand's astonishing tour de force,  I actually think this film is a load of old rubbish that doesn't amount to a hill of beans.