Somewhere in an upscale resort in Acapulco, a family of wealthy Brits is lounging. Adults Neil (Tim Roth) and Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) dreamily and sadly watch the sunset, teenagers Alexa and Colin (Albertine Cotting Macmillan and Samuel Bottomley) laugh at their own wit and sneak alcohol into cocktails. The idyll is shattered by a phone call – grandmother (or for some, mother) is sick, it is urgent to return to London. On the way to the airport, the family learns that there is no hurry, if only for the funeral. And then right at the front desk, Neal decisively declares that he forgot his passport at the hotel and catch up stunned by recent events of the family on the next flight. And then he takes the first available cab and goes wherever he can, away from the airport, family, London and the past life.
So begins Sunset by Michel Franco, a regular at Europe’s most prestigious festivals and a leading expositor of the social ills of his native Mexico. His previous film, The New Order (Grand Prix at last year’s Venice), was full of righteous anger, a premonition of imminent redemptive rebellion that will wash away the old unjust world with blood. His “Sunset” in this case is like the next stage of acceptance: life is unjust and no one’s blood will fix it. The disease has metastasized long ago, and the sunset of the old world is best greeted by sitting on the beach and uncorking another bottle of beer, carefully waiting in a bucket of ice.
Franco invites a cast of first-rate actors to enjoy this performance and gives them enviable roles that become more complex as the plot intrigue unfolds. Gainsbourg sincerely plays the loss twice to the point of recognition, gradually realizing that no amount of power and all the money in the world can hold back not only the dead, but also the living. Tim Roth is transformed from a gaudy egotist into either a fool or an enlightened one. And Mexico of the Poor becomes the protagonist and radically changes the genre of the story from a family drama about the rich who also cry to a crime drama told in her familiar language of the streets and stray bullets. Moving from the general to the particular, from social tectonic shifts to the hidden metamorphosis of one human soul, Franco discovers that they share the same route. From lost paradise and celebration without end to the most hopeless bottom. The sunset is inevitable, like a natural law.
Next, Franco, as is fitting for a skillful playwright, begins to unfold two lines at once: as Neal’s deed takes on increasingly clearer outlines, the sad Brit himself rapidly dissolves into the local sea air. One by one he gives up his home, his status, his language, his history… His phone goes silent, his belongings disappear, soon the weirdo Englishman himself leaves his plastic table on the beach and is finally lost in the sunset. Circumstances themselves weave themselves into the story of his life and cultural analogies: Albert Camus’s The Outsider, Thomas Mann’s Professor Aschenbach in the middle of Venice plagued by an epidemic… And all this while Roth sips his beer sadly while looking out over the waves. Somewhere over his shoulder, that Franco who heralded the apocalypse stubbornly bends his line – armed men strolling along the beach. The bandit bosses who inadvertently disturb the serenity of the landscape provide a disturbing backdrop, but do not leave a shadow on the face of a detached Neil. The idyll is imperceptibly broken; paradise is impossible even here.
One could gaze into it as endlessly as into the smile of Gioconda. And read only that emigration both internal and external is, as it were, a privilege. Without revealing Franco’s futile (as well as his family’s efforts to bring the fugitive back) final attempts to give the actions of the mysterious hero a dramaturgical basis, we want to note Neil’s striking immobility. The director has succeeded in creating a character who is more intriguing and beguiling by his inaction than by his other actions. How many times in life has everyone wanted to stop, to drop everything, to disappear? How many different, their own reasons can you discern in Roth’s sad eyes? The ending is one, and it is neither a cause nor a consequence, but just another indelible evidence of life’s injustice.