Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston is here at home remotely covering the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Click here for our continuing coverage of TIFF, and click here for our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
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Let me be absolutely clear before I start: I could not stand Michel Franco’s New Order when it played last year’s TIFF, and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to being smashed over the head with a sledgehammer engraved with the words “economic inequality leads to bad things” for another 90 minutes when it was announced that Franco’s latest film, Sundown, would be at this year’s edition of the festival. It’s important to keep an open mind about things: One bad at-bat doesn’t mean the next won’t at least drive in a run, and Sundown is a compelling and interesting step forward for the filmmaker, which demonstrates his capable direction as well as his talents at directing his actors, of which there is no better proof than Tim Roth’s performance in the film itself. It’s a meditative reflection on the beginnings of the end of a wasted life spent in the rigid trappings of wealth, full of lovely surrealist touches and eruptions of violence, with some manner of empathy for all trapped in this weird story’s web.
Neil (Roth), the aging scion of a wealthy English pork processor, is invited by his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) to vacation with her family at a resort outside of Acapulco, where they spend their days enjoying live music, good food, and idle time by the pool. But their good time is interrupted when they receive a call that their beloved mother has passed away, and immediately the family bolts to the airport. It’s at the gate, right before they depart, that Neil says he’s left his passport back in the hotel room, and that he’ll have to go get it. He’ll be on the next flight, he says, go on ahead without me. Upon leaving, Neil books a room at a small-time motel in the heart of Acapulco and begins to wander the beachy streets, his passport sitting in his bag right where he’d had it all along the entire time. A delay of a few days turns into weeks and subsequently turns into months, and Neil finds himself planting roots in the city, his family wondering why the hell he’s doing this and why he didn’t return for the funeral. He never says as much. He’s too busy taking everything all in. But when his sister comes to retrieve him, shit goes sideways, and Neil’s plans for a glorious future on the beach might be in jeopardy.
Roth’s often been known for his brash dynamism, from his first days as a skinhead in Made in Britain to his work with Quentin Tarantino to the later portions of his career, but he’s restrained here to the point of (pleasurable) frustration, as he drifts from locale to locale, swilling cheap beer, taking in the sun, and romancing a much younger woman. We’re given a few choice hints as to why he’s chosen this path for himself, renouncing his old ways and looking to recapture some measure of youthful pleasure, and it is suggested that the reason is of some terminal relevance to him before it’s outright confirmed near the film’s end, but the lack of a why for the majority of the film makes it all the more absorbing. As such, Roth’s work here possesses the kind of stoic affectless that defines a performer like Marcello Mastrioni in any number of films (La Grande Bouffe feels particularly apt, given its use of indulgence as both a coping mechanism and way to end one’s life) and his performance here remains unpredictable and compelling for the entirety of Sundown‘s runtime as much as the film itself does.
Franco uses the placid and oddly gentle nature of Roth’s character often to amusing and devastating effect. Sundown is much more careful with its protagonist than in, say, New Order, where brutality was the name of the game, even if it is nearly as acerbic in its depictions of wealth and the often violent responses to them by the poor. Yet he retains a clear sympathy for the entire cast that wasn’t present in that film, especially for Roth’s character: Even as he wreaks emotional havoc on the lives of those he claims to care about while maintaining his sad vacuity, Franco never loses sight of the fact that his protagonist is empathetically pitiable, him being a hole of a man who’s searching for something, desperately, to fill him up before he dies emptily no matter with what stoicism he faces his remaining years with. It stands in interesting contrast with plenty of the typical trappings of the mid-to-end-of-life-crisis genre, which has now gone in its cinematic expression, over the course of the baby boomer generation, from tragedy to farce to fantasy, and in plunging the depths of these urges, Franco posits a compelling reason why we’re drawn to these stories of domestic rupture and escape: It’s because, in some way, we’re all looking to escape, to be on our own terms before the show ends.