Title: Sundown
Director: Michel Franco
Language: English
Running time: 83'
Imagine you’re having the most relaxing vacation of your life, in a thousand-stars resort in Acapulco, being served drinks without even asking, and being able to even pick the piece of meat before having it cooked at a restaurant. Then, suddenly, the phone rings and on the other side they tell you that your mom, back in London, has been rushed to the hospital, and only a couple of hours later, they call you back to inform you that she didn’t make it. What would you do, if not rush to the airport to catch the first and fastest combination of flights towards London? This is what most of us would do, right? Well, not quite. Franco’s protagonist in Sundown decides he’d rather spend some more time in Acapulco.
The scenes described above are the beginning of the movie: Neil (Tim Roth) and Alice Bennett (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are spending their summer in Acapulco with Alice’s children (Albertine Kotting McMillan and Samuel Bottomley), when suddenly she gets the phone call informing her that their mom has been rushed to the hospital. While rushing to the airport, she gets a follow up phone call that tells her that her mother is now dead. When they all get to the airport, Neil realises he “forgot” his passport at the hotel, and pretends to go back to get it. He’s been incredibly calm and unbothered for the whole time now, not shedding a single tear for his dead mother. When he gets back to Acapulco, he goes to the first hotel he finds and we see that he has only pretended to forget his passport, which is safe and sound in his trolley. He starts spending his time in Acapulco, ignoring his sister’s phone calls, and enjoying his time on the beach. He even gets a new girlfriend, Berenice (Iazua Larios). For the whole time, he is completely unbothered, not thinking about his dead mother for a single second. He doesn’t even flinch when someone is killed right in front of his eyes on the beach. Suddenly, Alice shows up, and angrily she asks him what is wrong with him, why has he left her completely alone to deal with their mother’s funeral and everything else. What turns out is that he doesn’t care about the inheritance at all, he’ll just take a monthly stipend of how ever much his sister wants to give him. It’s here that we find out that they are actually the heirs to an empire of slaughterhouses, and this makes them amazing targets of a gang, that actually ambushes and kills Alice on her way back to the airport. Neil gets investigated for this, as he knew some of the gang members, but he’s still completely detached from the whole situation. We only understand at the end what was really going on.
For the whole duration of the movie, we feel like we are waiting for something to happen. We realise it’s a series of unfortunate events one after the other, but none of them is depicted as having any sort of real importance for the development of the story. They just all seem things that will build up for some greater climax to happen. The movie appears to be extremely slow, but this is its strength really. The director doesn’t want to express any judgement on the main character’s decision of abandoning his family in a time of greater need, and only at the end we understand why. Tim Roth’s interpretation of such a detached character leaves us to wonder whether Neil is sick in the head or a complete sociopath. This interpretation doesn’t allow us to sympathise with the main character until the last moment in the movie, we keep hating on this guy who has committed the most disgusting social crime ever. On the other hand, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Alice is the strong and independent woman ready to inherit the family slaughterhouse empire and keep it going as if nothing had happened. She lives her emotions to the fullest, she cries when she finds out her mom has died and she’s furious when she finds out that her brother had only been pretending of trying to come back to London to help her. The movie really couldn’t ask for two better performers in the lead roles.
Something else that Franco does in his Sundown is making us really ask ourselves the question: if we were in Neil’s same situation, would we really go home for our mother’s funeral, or would we try to avoid everyone to spear them the pain?
Comentários