Pregnant with calamity, 1913 is a melancholy date for anyone knowing anything about history. It was the final year of a long European peace, the year before the beginning of World War I, the bloodiest conflict ever. Sunset unfolds in the summer of 1913 in what was one of Europe’s great cities. In those days, Budapest was the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multi-ethnic state doomed by the coming war and the rise of extreme nationalism.
The protagonist is a melancholy, distracted yet stubborn young woman, Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab). She has the face of one who has lost everything and can no longer muster anger or even sadness. Panic, however, darkens her otherwise blank visage. Irisz arrives alone in Budapest, and as a woman alone is vulnerable to predatory men. She seems especially endangered because of the family she never knew. Orphaned at age two, Irisz understands only one thing about her family: Her parents once owned the palatial women’s hat salon where she applies for work.
Sunset is directed by Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes, whose debut, Son of Saul (2015), earned an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Stylistically, Sunset is similar to Son of Saul with its austere natural lighting and its tendency to hover alongside or behind its protagonist as if to show reality from a deliberately subjective, limited perspective. However, thematically, Sunset is a more difficult film. Son of Saul looked into a familiar subject, the Holocaust, from an unusual angle—the one-step-ahead-of-death Jewish cadre at a Nazi extermination camp tasked with disposing of the dead. Identifying Sunset’s subject is hard. It adheres to no genre and presents an enigmatic scenario from Irisz’s uncomprehending perspective. We see little of the world beyond her blinkered field of vision.
Suffice to say that Irisz is as unwelcome in Budapest as a noisy ghost. The Leiter salon’s new owner (Vlad Ivanov) is unhappy with her presence, but makes a tepid show of accommodation. The landlord of the house where she was born is openly hostile. Irisz is attacked there by a deranged coachman jabbering about a brother she never knew she had. The agency that handled her adoption refuses to show her the case file.
Sunset is at first an intriguing mystery as Irisz learns of her family’s tragic past in piecemeal fashion. There is talk of a deadly fire that killed her parents and rumors about the shocking murder of a count—possibly by her unknown brother. And then Sunset gets tricky to follow as Irisz wanders into an ill-defined underworld of criminals? Revolutionaries? Maniacs? A sense of unfathomable evil lurks in the shadows—and the shadows are deep in this 20-watt world of gaslight, candles, dim incandescent bulbs and lanterns swinging from rattle-wheeled coaches like angry specters in the darkened streets. Sunset is suffused with an angst over unknown forces, the id of a vulnerable society, that might suggest the writings of an author contemporary to Sunset’s time, Franz Kafka.
