Tim Roth plays a man escaped in the puzzling SUNDOWN
Written and Directed by Michel Franco
Starring Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Iazua Larios, Henry Goodman
Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes
Unrated
Available to watch on VOD and in theaters February 3rd
by A. Freedman, Staff Writer
When people say they want to party like the 1% do, they may not realize just how miserable of a reality that life may be. As Sundown begins, we meet Neil and Alice Bennett (Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg) and their family, on vacation together in Acapulco, Mexico. It's a lavish stay at an oceanside resort, not unlike the one we saw last summer in The White Lotus. If you've seen any of director Michel Franco's other films, like last year's New Order, you are already dreading whatever horror awaits the Bennett family. Franco's focus of late has been the seismic gap between the haves and the have nots- and how this gap inextricably ties these polarities together. In Sundown, Neil is about to jump headfirst into this gap, like the cliff divers entertaining them at their safe little resort.
When Alice receives some bad news, the Bennett family vacation comes to an abrupt end, as they get ready to fly back to London. Only when they arrive at the airport, it seems that Neil has left his passport at the hotel. With no time to waste, they have to go ahead without him, hoping that he can catch the next flight. Neil gets in a taxi, and it becomes quickly apparent that he has intentions beyond finding the passport that may or may not be missing. Neil meets a woman named Berenice and quietly revels in the opportunity to exist where nobody knows him.
Sundown plays some funny games with the fantasy of abandoning all of your responsibilities and literally walking away from your life. Like the recent film The Lost Daughter, Franco is interested in how we long to escape the ties that bind, and being honest with ourselves about the fact that those ties aren't always joyful ones. My perception of Neil changed drastically over the course of the film, as layers are peeled back and we begin to understand more of what led him to this peculiar junction in his life. The roots of his apparent misery are not what they seem, as a very male kind of fantasy starts to look like something else entirely.
In Franco's New Order, he portrays a near future dystopian Mexico where class war turns into actual war- a not-too-exaggerated version of today's Mexico. He cast a critical eye to the horrors of corruption and violence, and how those horrors have become so normalized. In Sundown, the first time you hear gunshots, it comes as a huge shock to the viewer, but the bystanders in the film seem less surprised. Franco has spoken of how he wanted to portray the vacation destination of his childhood as a place not untouched by the ripples of violence. Inevitably, Neil comes face to face with the realities of trying to blend in as a wealthy white Englishman in Mexico, as the fantasy turns into more of a nightmare. Think Y Tu Mama Tambien by way of Dead Man.
Sundown is over and out in under 90 minutes, and while Franco's worldview seems bleak as ever, his economy of storytelling is quite strong. He gets his point across and doesn't drag things along to further emphasize his point. After watching the movie, you might feel less bad that you can't afford a trip with the Bennett family, while that lakeside beach half an hour away starts to seem pretty pleasant after all.