sunset…

I went to the Watershed this morning along with lovely friends Jeanette, Jeff and Ed to see Laszlo Nemes’s “Sunset”. It’s set in Budapest in 1913, in the death-throes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and on the eve of WW1. A young woman (Irisz Leiter, brilliantly played by Juli Jakab)(who looks a lot like Emma Watson to me) returns to the city, after being fostered at the age of two under mysterious circumstances. She hopes to work as a milliner at the famous Leiter store that once belonged to her parents (who died in a fire on the premises after which the store was rebuilt and re-established as a lucrative concern). The new owner clearly doesn’t want her there and buys her a first class ticket to leave. However, the intrepid Irisz refuses to obey and is drawn into the city’s dark turmoil and the uncertainty about her past.

 

It’s a long, mesmerising film (142 minutes); beautifully shot (with slightly washed-out colour)(ok, I’m no good at the technical stuff!) and featuring LOTS of excellent hats! It’s not always clear what is happening - but that, to my mind, felt perfectly acceptable and in keeping with the film’s mystery. There’s a sense of Irisz wanting to claim back a place in the family business; there’s uncertainty about the existence of her brother (and even that he might have caused the fire that killed his parents); and there’s a distinctly threatening undercurrent throughout the film… almost a metaphor for the events that were about emerge in 1914.

I felt totally absorbed throughout and was hugely impressed.
PS: It seems that not everyone was quite as enthusiastic about the film as me… I noticed one postcard on the Watershed’s ‘feedback board’ simply asking: “What was that all about then?!”