Sundown

Here's a film I knew next to nothing about, except that it starred Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg, both ticks in my book. Oh, and that it was set at a resort somewhere. And Roth mentioned something about money. But that's it. And I'm glad I was mostly in the dark, because Sundown crept up like a stalking horse. In fact, a stalking thoroughbred, because it's a slow-burning triumph.

The film starts with a shot of a load of fish on a boat, eyes in sharp focus. Roth's Neil is staring down at them, looking as distantly bored as anyone has ever looked. The rest of the family - Alice (Gainsbourg), Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan), and Colin (Samuel Bottomley) - are enjoying their beach resort holiday in Acapulco (though we don't know where until some time into the film). The dynamic is very 'cool parent' as the teenage kids seem to be settling into an peer-like relationship with the adults. A phone call disrupts the idyll and the group must head back to London, initially due to an ill mother, later it turns out, for her funeral. 

This is where the metaphorical eyebrows of the film start raising. Neil can't find his passport and tells the others to go without him and he'll follow on the next flight. But does he go back to the hotel to look for his passport? Does he bollocks. He gets a taxi to another, more rundown hotel by a beach, and proceeds to flomp. By flomp, I mean he does sweet fuck all. He walks to the beach, has a feed, has a beer, goes to bed. Rinse, repeat. This is Roth's second film for writer/director, Michel Franco after 2015's Chronic. Roth's fantastic again - he was recently in Bergman Island - and hopefully this is the start of a mid-career renaissance for him. He plays a normal geezer like no one else does.

After a few days, Neil meets a local shop clerk, Berenice (Iazua Larios), and starts to have it away. All the while, we're wondering 'what is this guy playing at?' Alice calls him several times only to be fobbed off with excuses about closed consulates and delays. Nothing is given to us, the audience, at least nothing black and white. Around this point in the film, I recalled a kind of thought bubble Neil was having earlier on, near the fish eyes. Could that be something? Surely, it's not simply a film about a dude who goes on holiday and stays there. Well, obviously, it isn't and the mystery here is unthreaded really delicately, with incidents landing so as to be paid off later (see beach shooting).

Sundown is quite a wonderful look at fatalism and societal strictures, and the story is superbly teased out for us, allowing the viewer to actually think about what might be occurring. By the end, Neil's flomping, his absolute dedication to inactivity, reads as a kind of unpublicised credo that is selfish, and at the same time understandable. This is a cracking film.

Sundown opens on July 7th at the Luna and Palace cinemas, with an earlier Movies with Mark screening at the Luna on June 26th.

See also:

Roth and Gary Oldman were great in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1990). You could even see Roth's character here as a super-serious, holiday version of Jeff Bridges' Dude in the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998).