"Politics
has made a mess of our lives." These words sum up the three-hour-long
saga Sunshine, a film about five generations
of a Jewish family in Hungary named Sonnenschein (German for
"sunshine") over the past one hundred or so years that has
some parallels with Alex Haley’s seven-generation Roots
(1976), though the principal male in the last three generations
(Ignatz, Adam, and Ivan) is a sort of Hungarian Jewish Forrest
Gump (played by Ralph Fiennes). The last of the line provides
numerous voiceovers throughout the film to provide continuity.
The movie is directed and cowritten by István Szabó. When
the movie begins, the patriarch of a prosperous family, who
has developed a moneymaking tonic from local herbs in the
days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, dies due to an explosion
in the distillery. When the twentieth century dawns, desires
for upward mobility prompt the younger Sonnenscheins to change
their German surname to the Hungarian name Sors due to pressures
for assimilation. However, two Sonnenschein sons gradually
diverge in matters of politics; Gustave (played by James Frain)
is eventually active in the short-lived Communist rule of
Béla Kun in 1919, while Ignatz remains loyal to the monarchy
in which he served as judge. When the monarchists (allied
with Romania) oust the Communists in 1919, Gustave flees to
exile in Paris, but Ignatz remains. However, no monarch is
restored; Horty de Nagybány sets up a dictatorship instead.
Ignatz’s son Adam becomes a champion in the sport of fencing,
and converts to Roman Catholicism to advance his athletic
career, which eventually results in a Gold Medal at the 1936
Olympics in Berlin. Fearing Hitler, Horty later decides to
appease the Nazis by rounding up many Jews, but there are
exemptions at first, and the Sonnenschein/Sors family remains
free. When the exemptions are abolished, the family is placed
in a Budapest ghetto. Later, father Adam and son Ivan are
among several thousand Jews taken to a concentration camp;
upon arrival, the Hungarian guards torture the father in the
eyes of the son and the rest of the Jews. Within five days,
Russians liberate Hungary in 1944. By 1948, Communist rule
is established, and Ivan is inducted into the police force
with the mission of rooting out the "fascist bastards," thanks
to the intervention of his elderly uncle Gustave, who returned
from Paris to become a Communist official. In due course the
next scapegoat of the Communists becomes the Jews, and Ivan
is placed in charge of a portion of the purge. Since he has
no stomach for the purge, he is active in the Hungarian revolt
of 1956, only to be incarcerated for three years after Russian
tanks end the uprising. At the conclusion of the film the
Hungarian people end forty-five years of Communist rule, a
development in which the surviving Ivan Sors plays a not inconsiderable
role. He then changes his name back to Sonnenschein. Although
the story is not a biography of an actual family, the rather
simplified historical events are based on fact. One message
in the film is that undemocratic regimes start out full of
promise but always degenerate into despotism; when the film
ends, true democracy hopefully arrives, though of course in
1994 former Communists, calling themselves the Socialist Party,
won a majority in parliament. Unlike the Italian Jews of Life
Is Beautiful (1998) or the Polish Jews of Jakob
the Liar (1999), the experience of the Hungarian
Jews in Sunshine appears closer to reality, depicting a family
that tried to show proper loyalty to Hungary first by practicing
ethnic coexistence, later by following an assimilationist
path, and finally by showing ethnic pride in a cultural pluralist
mode. Thus, a second message that becomes clear is that Hitler’s
rejection of the policy of ethnic assimilation made inevitable
the later assertion of cultural plural-ism, with worldwide
consequences. For both insights, the film has been nominated
for a Political Film Society award as the best film promoting
the values of democracy and human rights in the year 2000.
MH
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