T.im Roth down another margarita. Beside him a woman perpetually on the phone and very nervous (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and two boys. A family on vacation. This is not quite the case, and the fact that the two adults are not husband and wife, but brother and sister is only the first of a series of moments in which SundownMichel Franco’s film in cinemas from 14 April, takes the viewer off guard. The idyll, a luxury hotel with a private pool and mariachi playing ad personam, is soon discontinued. A phone call calls everyone to order, the mother is ill, the bags are packed quickly, she runs to the airport. The frenzy, however, does not infect the man, he cannot leave, he does not find the passport, that they board, he will join them.
Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Sundown.
Escape to Sundown
What is wrong with him, one wonders: why doesn’t the pain and anxiety about his mother’s fate infect him? Why he chooses to leave paradise for the rich and move to a beach for ordinary peoplewith all the risks that this entails (a settling of scores on the beach, the money stolen from the room of the modest hotel where the misunderstood taxi driver advises him to stay)? Sundown is the story of a crisisfrom an exit from the scene as the title (“sunset”) suggests, of the consequences of an original sin (Gainsbourg runs an empire and the business speaks volumes: slaughterhouses)?
Directed by Michel Franco
Mexican Michel Franco, who for the second time – after Chronic (2015) – directs the Londoner now naturalized from the United States, this desire chooses to take full advantage of his ability to abandon himself, to drag himself from deck to deck, from bottle to bottle without asking even one of the questions that instead crowd the viewer’s head. Presented in competition at the last Venice Film Festival, it left almost everyone unsatisfied. Franco’s previous film, New ordenwinner of the Grand Jury Prize 2020, it was pure shock: class struggle, revolution, siege, dictatorship. In Sundown there is a mystery, of course, and it’s all in the sketchy and ambiguous smiles of its protagonist, a man who seems to let himself be carried away by his flip-flops. Basically it is not a trivial matter.
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