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The more I've considered it over the last two weeks, the more I'm convinced that László Nemes' follow-up to his Oscar-winning debut feature has been wildly overlooked since its divisive festival debuts almost a year ago.

Strikingly beautiful from its opening frame, Sunset represents a maturation and refinement of the limited perspective and shallow focus techniques Nemes also memorably deployed in Son of Saul, but this time exploiting the tension inherent in these stylistic choices less for the you-are-there immediacy of Saul than to foster the sense of paranoia, anxiety, and uncertainty suffusing both the setting — Budapest in the immediate pre-WWI years — and the protagonist — Írisz, a young woman plunged into an ever-deepening mystery regarding her identity, her past, and her place in an unstable, violent world. Mátyás Erdély's 35mm cinematography is often stunning, showing off pure technical prowess — perfect focus pulls and seamless transitions from shadowy interiors to glaringly bright exteriors — alongside gorgeous low-light compositions and striking framings of the actors. The production and costume design is nearly faultless, and the immersive sound design is used to dispense many of the fragments of information audience and protagonist use to try — often unsuccessfully — to orient themselves in a swirl of nearly indistinguishable clues and lies.

Where Saul was — for better or worse, depending on your perspective on that film — almost entirely memorable for how its technical achievements affected its treatment of its subject matter, Sunset is far richer thematically and balances enough ambiguity in its characterizations and presentation of the narrative to demand multiple viewings without — for me, at least, though this was a common complaint from sleep-deprived critics at Venice and Toronto — lapsing into incomprehensibility. There's no value in getting into any plot details here, as I think the main character's disorientation is absolutely meant to be shared by the audience throughout, and while I don't think I could answer every question one might pose about every single sequence in this film, that definitely seems more feature than a bug.

Kristin Thompson notes in her essay on Sunset that Nemes cites Lynch's Blue Velvet as a direct inspiration, which fits perfectly to me, though interestingly the overlap she cites is that both films feature "an innocent gradually witnessing unimaginable cruelties". In addition to doubting that the protagonist in either is unambiguously 'innocent', I'd go further to say that both films depict the corruption and decay hollowing out the social and cultural foundation of a dominant but unstable empire through the lens of an outsider who is compulsively drawn to probing deeper and deeper into the oozing sores others are intent on denying even exist. That the three most striking performances and most fleshed out characters — Juli Jakab as Írisz and Evelin Dobos and Julia Jakubowska in supporting roles — are all women either being manipulated, exploited, or pursued by a constellation of violent and deceptive men is pointed. The idea of a sick — perhaps terminal — society asserting its fading influence and power by trying to dominate and control women can't help but feel resonant at the moment.

Perhaps more than anything else, I loved how deftly Nemes handles the expanding and contracting scope of the film: while Nemes' previously demonstrated ability to dynamically choreograph both camera and actors through scenes of sprawling chaos is put to strong use again here, there are also more intimate, quiet moments in between that stand out equally prominently in my memory. I was continually struck by how thoroughly otherwise innocuous scenes are presented with such an undercurrent of menace and looming danger — finally escalated in a climactic scene into outright horror — that is palpable, inescapable, and yet almost never manifested in a way that allows it to be definitively pinpointed or named.

I saw this the same day as Claire Denis' High Life, and while they're both compelling films deserving of continued consideration and revisiting, this is the one that I haven't been able to stop turning over in my head every day since. I know it has almost entirely disappeared from American theaters and it's currently unclear if it will get a US bluray release, but I'd urge anyone who has the opportunity to seek it out; whether you think Nemes ultimately keeps his balance on the technical and narrative tightrope he's walking here, it's an act worth witnessing.

I may be the only person on this planet to feel indifferent to Son of Saul, so I wasn’t exactly getting goosebumps leading up to this one, despite some strong interest after DI's raves a while back. Well this was a smack in the face of that tempered reaction, a lucid dreamlike adventure with a respect for both narrative participation and stark reality. First it must be said that all the wonderful filmmaking would have been for naught had a talent like Juli Jakab been absent as our focal point. She’s a revelation: determined, calculated, courageous, insightful, and yet carrying a sense of ignorance that forces innocence by comparison to the unforgiving patriarchal and seedy underworld milieu that she attempts to infiltrate. I can get behind those Blue Velvet nods too, as this is basically a neo-noir as told through a golden hued tone poem, where we are consistently prompted to consider the complicated relationship between audience and surrogate which mirrors our protagonist’s own challenges to connect and discover truth in the natural and constructed world around her.

This is a film that has all the ingredients of subjectivity but our intimate physical and emotional closeness to Irisz is a facade, for regardless of those characteristics she emits, the internal drives and conditions of her social context can only be discovered as we walk through the world with her, but it’s one she’s known to some extent for her entire life. So we discover the context that has shaped her without hope at knowing the facts while she searches for facts in said context in her own mission that is futile in achieving the lengths she wants from it. I loved how the realism comes into play with the mysticism: clues go nowhere, information is cryptic and unclear or surging in multiple spaces at once, advice is contradictory, all servicing the intangibility of the atmosphere of her mentality, her experience of the physical space she’s in, as well as the real world outside and the projected world in the narrative objective to Irisz. Blurring camera distortions and shifting perspectives from following Irisz in unison with her quest to sideways or direct confrontations facing her, close to eye contact, from an alternate angle continuously disrupts our orientation and reminds us that we are not in control or inside of her head just as she is limited in her own power and knowledge inside the film. There is no safety in this film, no comfortable path of engagement, even in a beautiful mysterious fever dream masking itself as a period drama on the surface. Jakab’s facial expressions are even vague enough to mimic anger, sadness, disgust, or even polarized confidence and fear together in a singular disposition that becomes all the emotions in the complex psychology of an existential crisis boiled down to an attempt at a sole focus to make sense of the world.

That’s not how it works, of course, and Jakab’s late request to “help me see clearly” in response to the ominous comment on the darkness of the world is as transparent an alignment as we get here. I’m not sure what happened in this film, but after reading the article DarkImbecile posted as well as his comment, I think that matters much less than the sensation this triggers for the viewer. This was a huge improvement from his last film, although a much more challenging work to be sure. Here’s hoping Nemes continues on this path of expanding and deepening his scope without sacrificing the stylistic trademarks that find a rare vulnerable space teetering on the brink of the subjective without breaching the mystery of the human soul or the social environment. The ending is fittingly its own accumulation of tension and discomposure to reach an apocalyptic state of pandemonium. Is there catharsis? Maybe not in answers as much there is in action; when the world is aflame and anarchy in place, confusion over hidden rules and order become obsolete and the homeostasis of the oppressed and outcasted can bloom.

Spoiler

While I admittedly did not follow much of the plot, the scene near the ending when Jakab enters the large room and the men all begin to grab her before a quick cut to her standing safe and alone against a pillar in a different space, is just a nightmare and the missing footage leaves either an assault to the imagination or the literal imagination sparked by fear to it. Was that the sex trafficking ring alluded to in the end, or a manifestation of that fear? Freaky stuff.

Thanks, DI, for prompting me to finally watch this. It's unquestionably going to bump something off of my top ten list last year.

Glad you enjoyed it (and hope others will seek it out now that it's not just me alone on this particular limb)!

The 75th Venice Film Festival admittedly had a pretty strong lineup, so I get why it was somewhat overshadowed and never quite got the spotlight it deserved (despite beating out Roma for the FIPRESCI critics' prize), but I'm still puzzled as to why this seemed to leave so many American critics cold. Maybe Thompson and Bordwell can conspiratorially whisper in enough ears at the Criterion offices to get this a physical release in the US...

Hopefully... you’d think that coming off such a hit in the U.S. there would be more keen eyes but my bet is this is just a uniquely uncomfortable experience to access for mass audiences vs Saul as a reason it didn’t and won’t fare as well.

I’m curious if you feel you got a handle on the plot/mystery at all? This definitely begs for another viewing especially after spending a round with a more than palatable focus in soaking up the vibe and acclimating to my role as an audience member

A few more thoughts that are reeling in my mind: This feels like the opposite of what 1917 did, obviously not with a single-appearing tracking shot, but a closeness to the subject that felt confining, extrasensory, and transplanting at once; while that film relied on spectacle removed from audience engagement (in my view), this utilizes the ideas for the desired effects of that film (I think) by forcing internal stress management and stimuli-compartmentalizing in the hope of stable orientation. If we took that kind of 'gimmick' and transformed it into this kind of complicated intimate cinematic experience, I'd champion this as Best Picture worthy easily.

The film's disorientation and constant reminder of the diverse levels of instability we feel as individuals in a social world as well as voyeurs in a cinematic venture weave terror throughout this experience, and I'd argue that the final act reaches a sense of horror few films can match. This is where I have to check myself and my loose definition of "horror" (though this experience is far more unsettling for me than something from most masters of horror, for example Argento, who I love for different reasons). For those that have seen this, divorced from my previous question of "what the fuck happens in this movie?" - What was your sense of the horror in the climax?

Spoiler

And what of that final shot of Irisz appearing to smile in with the revolutionary (?) group? Do you think she was finally alleviated of the stress due to the anarchic dismantling of oppressive and cryptically defined systems, as I alluded to in my initial post; or perhaps free of the weight of the mystery through the destruction of said systems having reached a level of acceptance at its now-concrete impossibility; or something else entirely?

I really did not like this film. But I was ready to give it a shot because though I also did not like Son of Saul, it was certainly impressive. I went out of my way to watch Sunset at a showing at the Lincoln Center and I was interested in what Nemes had to say during the Q & A.

Son of Saul on paper is right up my ballpark. A director's movie with long takes. I expected to eat it up. But its artificiality wore me down. I still think it is an impressive film in some ways but ultimately frustrating and exhausting.

I found Sunset doubly so. Nemes espoused a theory about his film-making which while intellectually sounds good makes for nearly unwatchable cinema.

What Nemes said is that he is essentially trying to replicate the first-person perspective in cinema and he rejects the omniscient "god" perspective. He calls it arrogant. He says we can never know everything or see everything, there is always uncertainty and ambiguity and he wants to replicate that in cinema by bolting the camera on his lead characters and quite literally give us a limited field of vision of shallow focus and visually impair us while also obfuscating the plot so that he can barely construe what the fuck is going on. He specially said he could never make something like Roma with its pristine master shots where you can see everything, and notice everything and know everything about all characters etc. etc.

What Nemes is attempting is interesting and worth exploring but there are better ways to do what he's trying to achieve without making such unwatchable shaky-cam films.

I don't know. It's not for me is all I can say. He's certainly enormously skillful. You get that by watching his films - of course. I just wish he would make something more "traditional". Cinema can convey a lot even without resorting to stunts and tricks and gimmicks. He should maybe grow up a little bit, let go of his intellectual pretensions, deal with the medium he is working in and make a movie with the enormous skill in staging that he clearly possesses.

All directors can learn. It was gratifying to hear Tarantino say at the recent DGA lunch or whatever that he learned something on Hateful Eight too - essentially dealing with the medium he was working in. I hope Nemes can learn too.

Nasir007 wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 5:33 pm What Nemes said is that he is essentially trying to replicate the first-person perspective in cinema and he rejects the omniscient "god" perspective. He calls it arrogant. He says we can never know everything or see everything, there is always uncertainty and ambiguity and he wants to replicate that in cinema by bolting the camera on his lead characters and quite literally give us a limited field of vision of shallow focus and visually impair us while also obfuscating the plot so that he can barely construe what the fuck is going on. He specially said he could never make something like Roma with its pristine master shots where you can see everything, and notice everything and know everything about all characters etc. etc.

What Nemes is attempting is interesting and worth exploring but there are better ways to do what he's trying to achieve without making such unwatchable shaky-cam films.

I don't know. It's not for me is all I can say. He's certainly enormously skillful. You get that by watching his films - of course. I just wish he would make something more "traditional". Cinema can convey a lot even without resorting to stunts and tricks and gimmicks. He should maybe grow up a little bit, let go of his intellectual pretensions, deal with the medium he is working in and make a movie with the enormous skill in staging that he clearly possesses.

All directors can learn. It was gratifying to hear Tarantino say at the recent DGA lunch or whatever that he learned something on Hateful Eight too - essentially dealing with the medium he was working in. I hope Nemes can learn too.

Hold on, let me get this straight. Nemes expressed that he is attempting humility by rejecting the notion that we can discover truth through omniscient filmmaking and dubbing it a facade to the human experience, and so he uses his strengths to provide a platform by which the audience can also keep themselves appropriately right-sized and makes an attempt to get us as close to the subjective experience as possible whilst knowing its limitations - and you think he needs to grow up because he didn't make a "traditional" movie that you wanted? There is so much wrong here I don't even know where to begin. Is your idea of growth to replicate the medium with complacency toward classic stagnancy? Your position that he "can learn" puts him in the position to give you the film you wanted to see, and elevates you to master of the arts, countering an attempt at humility with ego. Perhaps you should learn to meet a film where it's at and take perspective? I know you've expressed trouble identifying with internal logic separated from your own before, so maybe there's a barrier there but that's not the film's or filmmaker's fault that they tried to do something new and you couldn't access it. It seems very much that he said his response to cinema is dealing with the medium he's working with, when seeing that medium's limitations at accessing authenticity by rejecting the possibility of taking an omniscient perspective. I think he seems to be defining "gimmick" as the opposite of you, as one of classical cinema providing a filtered artificial lens to view the world, and he doesn't want to make that kind of film. Is that so hard to grasp? It sounds like you just don't want to see a first-person cinematic narrative, which is fine (even if it's a first-person film seen through the inevitable third-person narrative constraints which is part of his point, being unable to access the individual, or god, completely), but beyond that the film asks that you recognize the limitations of your perspective as all-encompassing, and that doesn't seem to be your stance towards cinema, or analysis.

Actually that argument of Nemes' reminds me a great deal of Fritz Lang who also did not trust the god perspective of the camera.

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:41 am I’m curious if you feel you got a handle on the plot/mystery at all?

In the sense of understanding the minutae of exactly who did what when and why, I wouldn't claim to be able to chart out the entire narrative (especially nine months after having seen it), which I would argue helps the film immensely; so much of the tension and anxiety is dependent on implication and elision of half-glimpsed and partially understood information.

Part of what makes Nemes' work on the film so masterful to me is that the film expertly conveys its overarching ideas (a corrupt empire rotting from the inside out, the anarchic revolutionary response to that decay, and both the soulless exploitation practiced by the established order and the fiery retribution of the rebellion against it ironically rooted in a literal facade representing genteel civility and high society) while keeping the viewer's immediate experience buried in the sensory overload and narrative confusion resulting from full immersion in this chaotic, paranoid environment where all motivations are suspect and little to no information can be trusted. To carry out that balancing act at each conceptual extreme while leaving a clear understanding of the narrative itself unavoidably incomplete and obscured — and at the same time pack the film with gorgeous imagery and stunning set pieces — feels like an achievement wholly out of proportion with the muted reception the film received.

knives wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 7:47 pm Actually that argument of Nemes' reminds me a great deal of Fritz Lang who also did not trust the god perspective of the camera.

Grow up, Fritz.

DarkImbecile wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 8:56 pm

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:41 am I’m curious if you feel you got a handle on the plot/mystery at all?

In the sense of understanding the minutae of exactly who did what when and why, I wouldn't claim to be able to chart out the entire narrative (especially nine months after having seen it), which I would argue helps the film immensely; so much of the tension and anxiety is dependent on implication and elision of half-glimpsed and partially understood information.

Part of what makes Nemes' work on the film so masterful to me is that the film expertly conveys its overarching ideas (a corrupt empire rotting from the inside out, the anarchic revolutionary response to that decay, and both the soulless exploitation practiced by the established order and the fiery retribution of the rebellion against it ironically rooted in a literal facade representing genteel civility and high society) while keeping the viewer's immediate experience buried in the sensory overload and narrative confusion resulting from full immersion in this chaotic, paranoid environment where all motivations are suspect and little to no information can be trusted.

Yeah I agree with all of this, which is why I decided to negate that question and then asked about the sense of horror and interpretation of her

Spoiler

smile

(though as I mentioned in my initial writeup, perhaps this actress' greatest strength is the ambiguity of expression, which only serves that analysis!)

I really like your description of how the mood and chaos within the mise en scene influence one another. The more this swims around in my mind, the more of a masterpiece it becomes. This was a great rec, DI, not only because the film is so great but because - whether you based your recommendation around my tastes or not - this is exactly the kind of layered philosophical/psychological stimulation I look for in cinema, both in form and content, considering my relationship to the medium and the medium's internal commotion together and apart

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 9:16 pm whether you based your recommendation around my tastes or not

I suspected you might like it, but mostly I just selfishly wanted someone else to see it so I could talk more about it.

I saw this a while ago when it ran in my then local cinema and absolutely loved it (would put it in my top 10 of that year), while having not been won over by Son of Saul earlier. So I was similarly surprised when this didn't make a bigger splash.

DarkImbecile wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 8:56 pm

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:41 am I’m curious if you feel you got a handle on the plot/mystery at all?

In the sense of understanding the minutae of exactly who did what when and why, I wouldn't claim to be able to chart out the entire narrative (especially nine months after having seen it), which I would argue helps the film immensely; so much of the tension and anxiety is dependent on implication and elision of half-glimpsed and partially understood information.

Agree with this. For me the feeling came close to reading some of the more epic Pynchon novels, if that makes some sort of sense. I still want to see it again some time to see if I can get a better handle on the details of the plot though. Don't have more to add right now, as most of my feelings correspond pretty well with the takes given so far...

kuzine wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 11:06 pmFor me the feeling came close to reading some of the more epic Pynchon novels, if that makes some sort of sense.

Funny I was thinking the same thing today and almost posted that it was like a psychological horror version of Pynchon’s conspiratorial unsolvable mysteries, though I usually go to Pynchon or Rivette when I realize the point of the mystery is to evoke anti-paranoia (to use Rosenbaum’s term from the essay in the BFI Celine and Julie) rather than follow the expected narrative path