It's a Ralph Fiennes festival! In Sunshine, Istvan Szabo's epic tale of a Hungarian Jewish family - spanning the downfall of a monarchy, two world wars and the Communist revolution - the English actor gets to play three roles, of three generations in the Sonnenschein clan: Ignatz, a scholarly and ambitious lawyer; his son, Adam, an Olympic fencing champion; and his son, Ivan (whose narration runs through the film's three hours), a concentration-camp survivor who becomes a Communist official bent on exacting revenge against his country's Nazi sympathizers.
It's an ambitious, sweeping saga, but by focusing on the one family - and by having the key roles performed by the same man - Sunshine succeeds in showing the tumult of the 20th century from a deeply personal perspective. This is a story of filial identity, of engaged intellects buffeted by the senseless rage of antisemitism, of failed assimilation and, ultimately, of survival.
Szabo, the Oscar-winning director (Mephisto, Colonel Redl) who wrote the screenplay with Israel Horovitz, manages to convey the intimate struggles of a close-knit Jewish family, the secret passions of lovers, the tragic mistakes of brothers and sisters, father and son, mother and daughter. And how fate - and war, and politics and religion - shapes the course of one's life.
In addition to the obvious symbolic continuity supplied by Fiennes, Szabo casts Jennifer Ehle as Ignatz's beautiful red-headed cousin, Valerie, and Rosemary Harris, Ehle's real-life mother, to play the same character in later years. The two actresses are equally spectacular.
Indeed, although Sunshine succumbs, here and there, to somewhat corny narrative convention, the cast is outstanding: James Frain, as Ignatz's idealist brother, radiates brooding intensity; Rachel Weisz, as Adam's brother's wife, secretly and desperately in love with the champion swordsman, is dark and destructively alluring; and even William Hurt, as a Communist investigator in the film's final section, shows a restraint, and regret, that is affecting.
Miriam Margolyes, as the fiercely proud Sonnenschein matriarch, Rose, and David de Keyser, portraying her husband, Emmanuelle, provide linchpin performances, and Deborah Kara Unger turns up as a steely, but sultry Communist comrade who falls into a doomed affair with Ivan.
Sunshine takes its title from the name Sonnenschein, and the herbal tonic Taste of Sunshine - a shimmering elixir that brings the family great wealth. Its recipe, scrawled in a black notebook, becomes a symbol not only of inheritance, but also of loss, as the name Sonnenschein is changed to the non-Jewish Sors, and as the book itself is hidden away, forgotten and ultimately destroyed.
It's a powerful symbol, in a powerful film.
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