SUNSET - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Seven - Official Competition

Like Laszlo Nemes' stunning debut feature, SAUL FIA, his latest film, SUNSET, is a movie so claustrophobic and intense - so beautiful and traumatic - that it winds you. It's hands down by favourite film of the festival so far.  Many directors are called or claim to be Kubrickian, but for my money it's Nemes who comes closest, with his precise and audacious lensing and framing, his languorous pacing, and his willingness to be obscure, mysterious, even nightmarish.  For all those reasons I can understand why many reviewers have struggled with SUNSET.  But I loved it.

The movie is set on the eve of World War One, in Budapest.  The Austro-Hungarian imperial power is shown through a ruling archduke and his wife, who patronise a high-end milliners.  It's to this store that our heroine and protagonist, Irisz Leiter arrives at the start of the film.  She seems naive, fragile, lost, and is applying for a job at the store despite the fact that her parents once owned it before being killed in a mysterious fire when she was a young girl.  The current owner, Oskar Brill, is immediately nervous of Irisz as is his assistant Zelma.  Irisz is surrounded by ominous snatched pieces of information delivered by threatening sources.  She has a brother she didn't know about.  He's a radical nationalist - accused of committing murder.  Then there's a mysterious Countess being abused, and girls being sold to the archduke....  I won't say more for fear or ruining the mystery.

What I loved about this film was its meticulous production design, lighting and shooting style. We move from luxurious palaces to ornate department stores to threatening underground political clubs, sometimes by street light or candlelight.  We feel the sense of threat and eeriness. The camera is always trained on Irisz - a technique carried over from SAUL FIA -but here Nemes loses the fish-eye lens that saved us from seeing the worst of the Holocaust.  Nonetheless he maintains the extreme shallow-focus that means the entire film is mediated through Irisz, with her face or the back of her neck filling much of the screen.  The result is the feeling of being trapped in a kind of nightmare.  And then, when we build to a pitch of intensity - when this frail girl shows a persistence and daring that is shocking - we move to an epilogue that hints at Kubrick and provokes as much as it resolves. Bravo!

SUNSET has a running time of 142 minutes. The film played Venice, Toronto and London 2018.  It does not yet have a commercial release date. 

SON OF SAUL - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

SON OF SAUL is a devastating and rightfully traumatic debut feature from the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes.  For 107 minutes he keeps his camera tightly focused on his protagonist - Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) - so that we only see the context of his action on the edge of the screen. We soon become grateful for this obscurity and start to wish that he had been as kind on our aural sense. Because everywhere we hear the mechanics of fear and death.  

Saul is a Sonderkommando in an un-named death camp.  As the movie opens he's helping newly arrived victims hang up their clothes before a "shower". He is ordered to stand next to the door of that room and hear them killed before he goes to the business of clearing up their clothes, washing out the room and disposing of the bodies. As the film goes on we will explore every part of that process - the men who stoke the fires of the crematorium with coal, the men who dump the ashes in the river, the men who perform the autopsies. All of them victims, and all of them living with the threat of being on the next list.