A hotel high on the cliffs, endless Pacific blue. The sun is beating down, the suite must cost a fortune, a silent waiter brings tequilas and margaritas, pool water spills over the edge of infinity, isn’t that what it’s called, Infinity Edge? If you could load film images with money, with luxury and a holiday feeling and loneliness, then that’s probably what the Mexican director Michel Franco is trying to do at the beginning of his film “Sundown”.
A man bobbles in the water, half thrown over an air mattress as if he’d like to just float forever. He is not alone, there is also a woman and two older teenagers, sometimes they talk to him, then he replies in a friendly way, as if from very far away. He drinks with them, he sits with them at dinner, and when everyone leaves in a hurry, sudden tears, a death, he also drives to the airport. But at check-in his passport is missing, how can that be, yes terrible. He shrugs, stays back.
One can read very little in the face of English actor Tim Roth, which is of course the intention here. And yet it is immediately clear that the matter with the passport is not correct. This man, Neil is his name, just wants to be left alone, not to be part of the drama anymore, and whether he still wants to be part of this family is something he’s obviously considering now. At first he still responds to calls, inventing new excuses and delays, then he simply switches off his phone.
The man hardly speaks anymore, brain and will have slackened existentially
It’s not nice of course, such a construct of lies, and that he leaves the woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) alone with the stress and sadness of the funeral. Is this a long-cold marriage and a cowardly exit, grab the Mexican equivalent of cigarettes and never come back? One might think so, but things seem to be different. He has neither a wife nor children, Neil explains to a beach vendor who is having a beer with him. He seems strangely believable at this moment.
Unfortunately, while Neil becomes more and more interesting in his lost state, this does not apply to this Berenice (Iazua Larios), who the film now pairs with him. He hardly says more than five words to her, how could he? His brain and his will are existentially slack, we understand that now. Standing next to him in a bikini like that, she looks about forty years younger, but that doesn’t stop her from sleeping with him and never leaving his side.
Should Berenice stand for the real Mexico that one can encounter in Acapulco? After all, Neil has now ended up among the locals, in a cheap hotel on the noisy and crowded Caletilla Beach. A Mexican director, one thinks, could have something to say about the dynamic between the two, if only that she senses his wealth behind his only shirt and the few beers he pays for. But no, she is without needs. At first she was still a saleswoman who had to live from her job, somehow anchored in reality. Now she apparently has endless time to stand by Neil, helping, loving and mostly silent.
So it becomes abstract and it is supposed to be, a pure cipher of a belated undeserved happiness and the question of whether this man is still capable of gratitude. You wouldn’t bet on it, because Michel Franco is a director with a very gloomy world view. His previous films have dealt with dehumanization, both in extreme poverty and in extreme wealth, and most recently cumulated in “Nuevo Orden/The New World Order”, a dystopian vision of the future with the super-rich and a revolution from below, military counter-attack and a truly hellish message: Let go drive all hope…
The violence in Mexico flashes again this time, for example with a shootout that suddenly breaks out on the beach, but which leaves Neil completely cold. Then there are the rules of family inheritance, which make it clear that he really cuts it all off, and hallucinations that show that even inherited wealth and a lifetime of well-cultivated incompetence do not protect against the guilt feelings of a real capitalist pig. It’s about a western man who always had too much and couldn’t make anything of it, a way into the sunset. But that Mexico and its people have hardly anything to add to this scenario, you wouldn’t have thought, especially with this director.
sunset, Mexico, France, Sweden 2021 – Director and script: Michel Franco. Camera: Yves Cape. Starring Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Iazua Larios, Henry Goodman. Rental: Ascot Elite, 83 minutes. Theatrical release: June 9, 2022.