Warning: This contains a lot of plot points!!
Reality on the big screen Three generations and a history of political change has been spread over three hours in a movie, Sunshine, showing as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. Surprisingly, it all works.
George Jonas
National Post
Once in a while a film comes along that is larger than itself. It becomes an event, a talking point, sometimes even the summing up of a period. Istvan Szabo's Sunshine, which premieres Monday at the Toronto International Film Festival, may be such a film.
The epic saga spans more than 100 years, recounting the tale of three generations of Sonnenscheins, a Jewish family in Hungary, whose name means "sunshine" in English. If Sunshine were a painting it would be a mural; as a screenplay it's a mix somewhere between Vittorio de Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Thomas Mann's The Buddenbrooks.
The story tells of great-grandfather Sonnenschein, a brewer who establishes the family fortune, followed by grandfather Ignatz who embraces, and is embraced by, Emperor Franz Joseph's 19th- century-liberal Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Invited to sit as a high court judge, Ignatz changes his surname to the more Hungarian-sounding (and less Jewish) Sors. In the next generation his son Adam, an Olympic fencer, carries assimilation a step further by converting to Catholicism in Admiral Nicholas Horthy's regency between the two world wars, a metamorphosis that fails to save his life when the Nazis take over. Finally Adam's son Ivan, the narrator of the story, becomes a Communist policeman, until his eventual disillusionment not only with communism but also with assimilation.
Sunshine is a marathon more than just in length. It's also a marathon in significance -- even for Szabo, a veteran director who has made significant films before, including the Academy Award-winning Mephisto (1981) and the Academy Award-nominated and Cannes Jury Award-winning Colonel Redl (1985), both starring the German actor Klaus-Maria Brandauer.
Sunshine, which is said to incorporate autobiographical elements from Szabo's own family history, is produced by Robert Lantos and Andras Hamori. Lantos, a figure of note in Canadian cinema, is a native of Hungary. He has become for this country's film industry something of what another Hungarian, Sir Alexander Korda, became for Britain's film industry two generations earlier (although the times and the personalities are so different that one shouldn't push the comparison too far). Sunshine is no doubt Lantos' most ambitious project to date. Arguably, it's also the most ambitious Canadian co-production (with Germany, Austria and Hungary), though probably not the most expensive.
All this is just background. The important thing about Sunshine is that it illustrates in a beautifully evocative way how the people of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy -- and, by extension, Central Europe -- managed to travel from an imperfect, flawed liberalism in the late 19th century to a perfect, flawless totalitarianism in the 20th.
Whether or not this is what the makers of the movie wished to depict is almost beside the point. Three hours is a long time to sit in a theatre, but not long enough to tell 120 years of history, especially when half of it is spent to explore -- sometimes in unnecessary detail, it seems to me -- the sexual peccadilloes of the movie's characters. But as the film is honest, well-crafted, and largely accurate, it gives people in the audience the opportunity to take away from it different lessons of their own choice.
Film reviews will no doubt discuss the tour de force of Ralph Fiennes portraying three generations of Sonnenscheins -- Ignatz, Adam and Ivan -- or daughter Jennifer Ehle and mother Rosemary Harris teaming up to play the young and old Valerie Sonnenschein. Critics may praise the fine performance of William Hurt as the Communist policeman Andor Knorr, or the outstanding cameo of whoever plays the supporting role of Olympic fencing coach Baron Felix Margittay. But since this isn't a film review, I'll say only that Sunshine makes an impact, at least for me, not so much for what it says or means to say, but for what it evokes.
The main function of art is synthesis rather than analysis. One might quarrel with Sunshine's interpretation of history here and there, or fail to share the filmmakers' judgment about this or that character, but in a movie it is the total effect that counts, and here the total effect is substantial. Sunshine is bigger than its script, as good films usually are. It is really a triumph for the art director (Atilla Kovacs), the costume designer (Gyorgyi Szakacs), the cinematographer (Lajos Koltai) and last but not least the composer (Maurice Jarre), in addition to Szabo. In short, it's a triumph for the power of visual and aural detail.
Despite the accuracy of its moral and factual compass, Sunshine follows a certain literary convention. In this convention Fascists are cardboard villains, while Communists are portrayed as characters of intriguing complexity.
In real life Fascists have been villains all right, but not necessarily cardboard, while Communists have included, and include still, opportunists and thugs without the slightest complexity, moral or intellectual. If this is rarely reflected in literature or cinema, it's because Communist influence in the arts has been stronger than Fascist influence. The fact is, familiarity doesn't only breed contempt. It also breeds understanding. To know is to forgive, at least to some extent.
Literary and film people have always tended to know Communists far more intimately than Fascists. Many had friends, mentors, proteges, or lovers who were Communists; some had been, or flirted with being, Communists themselves. Few artists had comparable familiarity with right-wing totalitarians. None, if they happened to be Jews. Jewish filmmakers often had Communist uncles, but they had no Fascist uncles to draw forgiving portraits about.
So Fascists remain distant ogres of inexplicable evil in Sunshine, while Communists, though roundly condemned and rejected, are treated with a degree of understanding and sympathy. The distinction is unwitting and it doesn't particularly harm the film, but it illustrates one of the moral pitfalls that claimed so many artists and intellectuals in this century.
When young Ivan witnesses his father, Adam, being murdered by Nazi thugs (in a scene, by the way, that even hardened moviegoers, inured to screen brutality, may find hard to watch) the lesson he draws from it isn't that murder is evil, but that revenge is sweet, and it's better to be in the ranks of the murderers than the victims. At least this seems to be his conclusion, because when his Communist uncle, Gustave, returns from exile in France after the war and recommends his nephew for a position with the Communist state security or "secret" police, Ivan readily accepts.
Ivan's Damascus comes when he has to prepare a case against his own chief and mentor, Andor Knorr, cast by the Communists as a "Zionist agent" in their next show trial. Ivan's task is to extract a confession from Knorr, a fellow Jew and secret policeman, who first introduced Ivan to the art of extracting confessions.
The task is typical; what is perhaps less typical is that in the movie Ivan balks at it. In real life some Ivans did, but most did not.
It remains an open question whether the movie's hero would suffer a crisis of conscience if ordered to build a false case against an equally innocent victim who happens not to be a fellow Jew, a fellow Communist, and a fellow secret policeman. The film provides no answer; by avoiding such an instance, it doesn't even raise the question.
In a sense this is just as well. It permits everyone in the audience to come up with his own answer. Speaking for myself, I doubt if Ivan, as portrayed in Sunshine, could understand the concept of evil until it personally affected him.
Perhaps evil has to literally fall on people's heads before they recognize it. In a 1929 essay the gifted but anti-Semitic Hungarian writer Dezso Szabo (no relation to Istvan) made the sarcastic remark: "We don't say to anybody at gunpoint: Assimilation ou la mort!" He meant that assimilation should be a natural process rather than an artificial choice, and forthright aliens in the Hungarian nation were preferable to aliens pretending (as he saw it) to be Hungarian.
Dezso Szabo was an anti-Semite, maybe even a proto-Fascist, but no more a cardboard villain than the Communists who came along 20 years later. Perhaps less, because he didn't endorse or even envisage murder. By the time he and other non-villainous devotees of the far right recognized that the fate of Hungary's Jews was to be Assimilation et la mort -- assimilation and death -- it was too late.
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