If you think of The English Patient, with its political and personal turmoil, multiplied by three, you have the picture of Sunshine.
You don't get just one illicit love affair, you get three in as many generations of the Hungarian-Jewish family, the Sonnenscheins ("sunshine" in Hungarian).
The playing around plays out against 20th century history - including the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the rise of Nazism and the rise of Communism.
Also like The English Patient, all the adulterers are women, and the instigators, too. An alternative title for Sunshine could be All About Eve (the apple eater, that is). So, if watching married women cuckholding their husbands - on tables, against walls, trees - appeals to you, this is the movie for you.
If you can get past all the sex - not easy because it's pretty steamy - you may notice that the movie is supposed to be about loss of self for the sake of acceptance, power, money, even survival itself. History challenges the Sonnenscheins' sense of self.
But even though family members' private lives recede now and again in long views of historical events, basically what you have here is a soap- opera.
It's as much these people's inherent lust and ego needs as it is history that threatens them. For all the sturm und drang of war, Sunshine leaves you annoyed at the frailties of this group.
Ralph Fiennes, star of The English Patient, is the male lead in each generation (and the one seduced each time): Ignatz, a judge who changes his family name to further his career; Adam, an Olympic fencing champion who changes his family's religion to Christianity to further his career; and Ivan, who breaks the chain of compromise and rediscovers his roots.
If you saw Fiennes in The English Patient and The End of the Affair as a cuckholder, you don't need to see him do it in three more stories. He plays a man overtaken by his passions beautifully, of course, but look at the practice he's had.
The standout performance is that of Jennifer Ehle (the real-life daughter of Rosemary Harris - who also is in the movie), who portrays a change of heart more persuasively than Fiennes portrays his constant suffering.
Sunshine is too heavy-handed for words as a political film. Would you believe after three hours of anti-emperor stories, anti-Hitler stories and anti-Stalin stories, each of Fiennes' characters sums up the movie for you!
And even before the movie starts, dark clouds turning to light behind the opening credits tell the story. Maurice Jarre's Godfather-like overture likewise foretells you're in for a big picture.
Back to Sunshine Article Index