Review of ‘Sundown’, by Michel Franco

From tomorrow until the day I die, time will be at my command. After so much waiting, this is leisure. What will I do with it?that’s how it ended Truce by Mario Benedetti, published in 1959 and considered the best work of its author. Leisure, truces, escapes, exiles and of course, the bitter weight of loneliness is also the last film of the unpredictable terrible kid Michael Franco. Closer to the rumble of April’s daughters (2017) that from the forcefulness, perhaps too explicit, of New order (2020)or After Lucia (2012)sun down It is the chronicle of a trip to nowhere and, moreover, of an abandonment, of a renunciation, of an unexpected and inevitable flight in the face of emotional and, above all, existential weariness. It is consistent that the violence that was reflected so clearly in a work of the caliber of New order, his previous film, appears here in a veiled, surreptitious manner, enveloping the impotence (indolence?) of its central character as if he did not feel threatened by it, or had already accepted it within the natural order of things.

Foreigner in Acapulco

Like Oedipus in his exile, or Hans Castorp in the sanatorium of magic mountain, a superb Tim Roth slides off the edge of a tragic destiny, while still enjoying the last forbidden pleasures, in what sometimes resembles an introspective version of A day of fury (Joel Schumacher, 1993) or even a review of mess in river (Stanley Donen, 1984) filmed with the cadence of Alain Tanner from in the white city (1983), where a placid Lisbon replaced what here is an Acapulco about to explode into a thousand pieces. Franco, prey to an inspiration as brave as it is lucid, recounts her particular descent into hell through Dante’s circles with pieces of Italo Svevo (the psychological puzzle of Zeno’s conscience), Albert Camus (his indefinable sense of humour, close to the philosophy of the absurd, goes very well with Abroad, as well as the approach to an environment that is as alien as it is unapproachable), Juan Carlos Onetti (the allegory of a country, which is also that of the individual himself, in the shipyard) and Don DeLillo (the breakdown of the family and the regenerative potential of violence in Background noise), without forgetting Ballard, Kafka or Coetzee, all of them essential authors to understand the filmmaker’s corpus. He succeeds, in short, aided by the prodigious work of his leading lady, as well as a brief Charlotte Gainsbourg, and by a splendid cinematography by Yves Cape, what is possibly his roundest and most complex film to date.

For supporters of the flight forward as a prelude to a forest of infinite paths

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DATA SHEET

Address: Michael Franco Distribution: Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Iazua Larios, Henry Goodman, and Samuel Bottomley Original title: sun down Country: Mexico Year: 2021 Release date: 27–05-2022 Gender: Drama Script: Michael Franco Duration: 84 min.

Synopsis: The wealthy British Bennett family is enjoying a relaxing vacation in Acapulco when a call announces a fatal event. Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) decides to cut the trip short while Neil (Tim Roth) pretends to have lost his passport and stays in Mexico. This attitude sharpens the differences between them to unsuspected limits.