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.

Son of Saul

I have been putting off writing about Son of Saul for weeks now, mainly because I was not keen to think about the film much, once it was done. Which is very far from being the same thing as saying it is a bad film. It is an astonishing film and it did such a horribly effective job of creating the impression that you were witnessing what really happened inside Auschwitz that, once released, if you are cowardly, as I am, you wanted as much as possible to push the experience from your mind.

Oddly, the technique chosen to conjure the experience so vividly is the maintenance of almost constant blurriness in the back of the shots, where unspeakable things are going on all the time. You can see that hundreds of people are being driven through dank corridors into changing rooms and then shower rooms and that heaps of corpses - or "Stücke" as the German overlords of the camp blithely call them - are all that remains some minutes later. But you can't see the individuals. I suspect  this was precisely how those picked out to work as members of zonder commandoes dealt with what they had to witness. The technique heightens the horror somehow.

I suppose one could object to the rather obvious quest plot that gives the film its narrative. You could argue that the film could simply have been about the real event that was the uprising in Auschwitz. However, that would have been less ambiguous than this tale, which leaves the viewer confused and horrified, rather than supporting one side as the goodies and the other as the baddies. The film makes clear that after the Holocaust, we live in a ruined world where there are no goodies and baddies, only an expanded knowledge of the potential humanity has to be wicked.

Not that the Germans are let off, mind you - the scene in which an officer murders a child with his bare hands, observed by his colleagues, is made all the more chilling by being shot as if it were a Vermeer painting. The weird interlude in which a group of German doctors are entertained by the crazed antics of a young officer who mocks the protagonist is equally vile. And then there is the endless ash. And the frenzied night scenes when the camp is overwhelmed by deliveries.

Horrible, horrible. The film reminds us just how horrible, and that cannot be anything but a good thing for a film to do.