Image: Bleecker Street Media
Sundown movie
Sundown is a film that doesn’t give up its meaning easily or early. The latest by provocative Mexican writer-director Michel Franco (New Order) is opaque and elliptical and puzzling—until the end when all the pieces lock together to form a picture of the story’s oddly lackadaisical protagonist, Neil, a difficult role played with outstanding sympathy by Tim Roth.
Be prepared to be left wondering, guessing, for the first hour of this hour-and 20-minute film. Let’s just say there is trouble in paradise when an idyllic family vacation is cut short. Eventually we learn that the five-star Latin American resort is in Acapulco and that Neil and Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) aren’t husband and wife (or congenial exes) but brother and sister. The teenagers Alexa and Colin are Alice’s children. The resort fronts a white beach at the rim of endless blue sea and sky, fringed by green hillsides. It’s a place for sipping Margaritas under sun umbrellas, swimming in pool or ocean and eating lavish meals. Servants materialize to fulfill every desire.
Gainsbourg is excellent when Alice is convulsed with sudden sadness. First the vacation-ending phone call from London that mother’s in hospital, then word of her death as the family rides to the airport in a hotel shuttle. At the gate, Neil abruptly remembers that he left his passport at the hotel. Anger at her nitwit brother overcomes Alice’s sorrow (Gainsbourg is good with tightly compressed rage). Go ahead, he tells them, promising to follow them home on the next flight. But he never follows.
Instead, Neil tells a cab driver to take him to a hotel, any hotel. He rides silently as the cabbie chatters en route to a part of town where tourists never go. In many scenes that follow, Neil is surrounded by Spanish speakers, comprehending little and caring less. He drinks alone on the crowded beach while a Norteño band holds forth as an army patrol in full battle gear steps among the sunbathers. Neil’s in a dangerous zone (in more ways than one). Later, an assassin leaps from a jet ski, shoots someone down and zooms away. A crowd gathers, shaking their heads at another murder. The contrast between everyday life and the five-star resort is clear.
Neil drifts into an affair with the English-speaking woman from a corner shop (Iazula Larios) and continues to promise Alice that he’ll sort out the lost passport. Eventually he puts his cellphone in the nightstand drawer and shuts it.
Although Neil takes lodging in a noisy neighborhood, shrill with passing police sirens, silence is the film’s prevailing tone in a muffled echo of the silent spaces in Neil’s head. He’s disaffected, seemingly half aware even when sober and offers no explanation for the sudden break with his life. The gradual accumulation of surreal moments flashes a warning light.
Sundown is a well-composed film that demands attention from the audience. Neither long nor in a hurry, its languid pace is as one with Neil’s blurry reveries. No longer a tourist, he’s become a stranger in a strange land and a stranger to himself.
Sundown opens Thursday, Feb. 3 at the Downer Theater and AMC Mayfair.
