Anyone familiar with the work of Mexican director Michel Franco, whether they be admirers or detractors, can attest to the “this is not going to end well” sentiment his sordid cinematic provocations instill. With a pensive angle, “Sundown” – a reteaming between the filmmaker and his “Chronic” star Tim Roth – upholds that tension of expecting the worst to come the characters’ way.
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Luxurious accommodations, salted-rim cocktails, and enviable ocean views comprise a paradisiacal vacation in Mexico for a wealthy British family of four. Reading between the lines, one infers this is not a couple and their children traveling, but siblings Neil (Roth) and Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) with her teenaged son and daughter. Their breezy stay, however, is soon eclipsed by a sudden death back home.
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Franco once against abandons the city for the coast as he did previously with “After Lucia” and “April’s Daughter,” features where sun-drenched locations are tainted by the darkest of human machinations. In “Sundown,” the backdrop is Acapulco, a quintessential beach town in the state of Guerrero. Once the playground of Hollywood royalty and a preferred getaway for Mexican nationals, in recent years it has become a hotbed for drug-related violence.
Emotionally detached from the ongoing situation and mourning, concerned mostly with maintaining his own peace, Neil lies his way out of going back to Europe. Away from the exclusive resort designed for foreign tourists, he finds a hideout among the local populace in an inconspicuous hotel serving the part of town where few gringos venture. Franco makes danger known through a heavy military presence, embodied in soldiers patrolling.
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Giving a nearly mute performance as a man with little left to say and who also doesn’t speak Spanish, Roth’s demeanor is one of immutable resignation, unfazed by whatever mishaps arise. Such resolute calmness and disinterest in conflict testify to the actor’s ability for the understated construction of a character. In his collaborations with Franco, including the border crime drama “600 Miles” that Franco produced for director Gabriel Ripstein, Roth has found space to potentiate those muted performance traits.
Neil’s collected indifference for material feuds collides with Alice, a livid counterpart in charge of running the clan’s meat business. The more he maintains serenity and turns the other cheek, the more ire he awakens. Always an onscreen force, Gainsbourg only gets a handful of appearances, yet each of them injects great distress and contempt. Their numbered encounters read as conversations between a person still attached to mortal preoccupations and a ghost completely, and unnervingly, freed from those chains.
Things begin to look up for Neil as he initiates a sexual relationship with a local woman, Berenice (Iazua Larios), about whom we disappointingly learn next to nothing other than her disinterested fondness for the white man. Theirs is a carnal affair that disposes of language. But as the days mount, their comings and goings from bed to sand give the film a warped pace, painting the impression of it being much longer than it is. Neil’s reiterated need to return to the cleansing water at all costs loses some focus when the plot veers into “Locked Up Abroad” territory.
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Working with Belgian cinematographer Yves Cape for a second outing, Franco favors static wide shots inside rooms or at the beach to take in the whole environment from a distance. The sense of being visually removed from the action or seeing Neil get lost amid crowds reminds us that this is not a story of intimacy, but rather about decisions that one can’t verbalize or chooses not to explain to others. “Sundown” is at its most psychologically intriguing in scenes that connect recurrent narrative symbolism: Neil is seen often seen showering or swimming in a pool — submerged in processed water — but only inside the natural salty sea with Berenice.
On the other hand, the director, who in the past has successfully summoned motifs, uses metaphorical pigs here to direct our attention to Neil’s headspace, but their significance remains unclear — perhaps guilt given that the family’s money came from animal suffering, or maybe even something much less concrete. The late insertion of this imagery with little context is puzzling enough for one to peruse its possible meaning in relation to how many times we see members of this family sign documents instead of engaging with their feelings.
Halfway through his ill-conceived retreat, carnage occurs in broad daylight but doesn’t much bother Neil or anyone around them, noting how common such incidents have become in this area of the country. The blood washes away in the ocean, soon to be forgotten. And while this isn’t the sole sequence where shots are fired, the deployment of violence is far less exploitative than in Franco’s controversial previous feature “New Order,” a brutal class dystopia that also debuted at the Venice Film Festival — though it is similarly questionable.
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Thinking back to “Chronic,” Franco’s first English-language effort — a movie about the emotionally draining challenges of hospice care in which the director and Roth touched on mortality — the dialogue with “Sundown” is strong. Both wrestle with what it means to live and die on one’s own terms, or to have that option truncated by a twisted turn of fate. “Sundown” doesn’t subvert what we’ve come to expect from Franco’s work, but it is still a distinctively cerebral rumination. [B]
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