On S List of Movie Reviews
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Sunshine (1999)
Rate:
7
Viewed:
4/25
4/25:
It's difficult to find a film with Ralph Fiennes in top form apart from
Schindler's List.
Happily, Sunshine exists. Ralph Fiennes is so much better here than he was in
The English Patient. While watching the film,
I thought of Mephisto by
noticing the similarities and didn't realize this was the same guy who directed both: István Szabó.
Three hours is too short to tell a highly ambitious story involving three generations. Some
have succeeded in this task because of the allotted running length:
The Godfather trilogy, Roots, and
Novecento with the first two taking nine hours and the
third five hours. Therefore, each generation in Sunshine should be three hours long; that way,
nothing is rushed.
The first didn't click with me. It's because there are so many events packed that the narration
feels overwhelming. But the next generation is when the movie started to get better. It's the most developed
of three. The third is fine yet needs more running length. All of the characters should be aged as time passes.
A constancy throughout is the outstanding photography which was shot in Budapest, Hungary; Austria; and Germany.
It's interesting how the family identity of Hungarian Jews is lost through the upheavals of society. To no
fault of their own, the characters are oblivious or don't think deeply about it. They just adapt to obtain
favorable situations. Many events happened for real, but this is rather a film à clef. For example,
the fencing champion is based on Attila Petschauer who earned medals in the Olympics but perished in the
Holocaust afterwards because of his Jewish heritage.
Ralph Fiennes plays three different characters: one for each generation. Initially, the switch may seem
awkward, but he has found a way for me to move on from it. However, his sex scenes are more gratuitous than
meaningful. István Szabó might want to rethink them a bit. The rest of the cast toes the line, but Rosemary
Harris has done a poor job of connecting with what Jennifer Ehle had accomplished, despite their mother-daughter
relationship in real-life, to become the most important character of the film.
All in all, Sunshine never feels like an epic and should've been converted into a miniseries, but
I don't mind seeing it again.