Butler's Cinema Scene

Juli Jakab

“SUNSET” My rating: B 

142 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes, who burst upon the world scene a couple of years back with the harrowing concentration camp drama “Son of Saul,” steps even further back in time with his sophomore effort, “Sunset.”

Shortly before the outbreak of the first world war, Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) returns to Budapest, where she was orphaned at the age of two.  Her goal is to get a job at the famous hat store founded by her late parents and which still bears her family  name..

Her return to the city of her birth sets off a series of puzzling and threatening events. Brill (Vlad Ivanov), the courtly current owner of Leiter’s, gives her a job making hats and seems  benevolent if businesslike. But Irisz starts getting odd vibes about the other young women working there, some of whom have disappeared with little trace.

A scary man appears in Irisz’s bedroom to threaten her; she learns that she has an older brother of whom she has been unaware, a notorious criminal leading a deadly anarchist gang.  In fact, this mystery sibling already has staged an assassination attempt on Brill.

Initially Jakab appears to be an impassive performer. Irisz’s emotions are carefully boxed up.  But as the story progresses and the stakes become higher her still features — especially her eyes — become more animated. It’s like opening a Pandora’s box.

And then there’s the cinematography of Matyas Erdely, whose compositions often find Irisz in crisp focus while the world around her is blurry and dreamlike. That was the same technique employed in “Son of Sam” to visually explain the tunnel vision that allows a death camp inmate to go about his ghastly duties, but how does that apply to Irisz?  After all, she’s looking for answers and clarity, not to escape reality.

Eventually our heroine does catch up with her criminal brother, just in time for a murderous raid on a soiree attended by some of city’s most powerful figures.

The film is thematically rich.  The impossibly ornate hats sold by Leiter’s to well-heeled ladies become characters in themselves, representing a world of wealth and privilege about to crumble beneath the wheels of war and a changing social order.

Observes one wag of the millinery finery: “The horrors of the world hide behind these infinitely pretty things.”

“Sunset” establishes a weirdly compelling mood, aided in large part by brilliant production design and costuming that mixes dirty street-level life with the Grand Epoque excesses of Lieter’s and its posh customers.  Visually and aurally the film is so richly detailed you can practically taste it.

But the screenplay (credited to Nemes, Clara Royer and Matthieu Taponie) rarely explains itself, approaching big moments tangentially; the proceedings often go off the rails and drift into the ether.

| Robert W. Butler