Don't be fooled by the title. Over the course of its disturbing yet often invigorating three hours, Sunshine inhabits some of the darkest areas of human behavior.
That much is to be expected from Istvan Szabo, the gifted Hungarian filmmaker who has explored -in movies such as Colonel Redl (1985) and the Oscar-winning Mephisto (1981) -the Faustian pact that humans often strike in order to stay the course.
With Sunshine, Szabo takes on nothing less than the turbulent history of 20th century Europe, as refracted through three generations and 150 years of the Hungarian-Jewish Sonnenschein family.
Ralph Fiennes, in his most demanding screen performance in years, plays three very different men across three different periods, and clearly delineates each.
Their common bond: survival in a changing political and social climate in which -Szabo and co-screenwriter Israel Horovitz suggest -simply existing day to day exacts a price.
The result sometimes veers toward soap opera. Still, there's no denying the rare ambition of a film with intelligence and empathy to burn: You go in expecting a history lesson and emerge impressed -often against the odds -by the shifting hues of humanity.
The film has barely begun its flashback narration before the meaning of the title becomes clear. Emmanuel Sonnenschein (David de Keyser), the tale's great-grandfather, has made his fortune from a family recipe for an herbal tonic known as "Sunshine."
The Sonnenscheins, it seems, are on the way up, having progressed from village tavern-keepers to city lawyers, with Fiennes' Ignatz embodying the social ascent. Among other things, he's keen to change the family name to the less-Jewish-sounding Sors.
A famously severe magistrate, Ignatz's private life is colored by an illicit marriage to cousin Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), whom he once loved as a sister and then nearly destroyed by deriding her as a whore.
Life in the public eye isn't much easier. Ignatz embraces a defiant assimilationism that proves a troubling touchstone for the family members who come after.
The next generation provides the film's truly enduring sequences, pushing the film forward from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and into the charnel house of World War II.
Fiennes reappears as Adam Sors, the youngest son of Ignatz and Valerie, a brilliant swordsman whose path to Olympic fencing glory includes his conversion to Catholicism.
His newfound religion notwithstanding, Adam meets a grisly fate. Even those inured to images of Holocaust atrocities may find this character's end near-impossible to watch.
His death, in turn, leaves Adam's son Ivan (Fiennes again) to confront issues of vengeance and retribution. His own circumstances include a secret liaison with a married policewoman (Deborah Kara Unger, in the film's least convincing role), and he finds an unlikely ally in a fiercely anti-fascist Communist (a mustachioed William Hurt).
From there, it's on to the toppling of Stalin and the Hungarian uprising, larger events always sifted through the Sonnenscheins' traumatized -yet possibly redemptive -lives.
Sunshine is sufficiently dense that it defies thumbnail synopsis, and some filmgoers may surrender to it as a sweeping epic.
Among the film's more than 150 speaking parts, special attention must go to the real-life mother-daughter team of Rosemary Harris and Jennifer Ehle, playing older and younger versions of the same person.
Ehle, who just won the best-actress Tony Award for her performance in Broadway's The Real Thing, sets Sunshine's narrative course early by remarking that the family is "already doomed to hell." With that comment in mind, Harris' emergence as Valerie's older, widowed self is doubly moving, since the character has acquired a sense of serenity and peace.
Valerie, by the end, is said to possess "the gift of breathing freely," after decades of imprisonment and tumult. From grief, Harris suggests, can come a kind of grace. In a film suffused with sorrow, Harris' lovely performance lets in the sun.
Sunshine is a Paramount Classics release, co-produced by Robert Lantos and Andras Hamori. A hefty 180 minutes, the film is rated R.
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