from the Daily Telegraph, 4/28/00
The thing with very good British actors is that after a while they want to play all the parts. I don't mean they want to play Hamlet and then King Lear and Uncle Vanya and all that: I mean that they want to play King Lear and Gloucester and Goneril and the Fool, simultaneously.
As if the exploration of one character wasn't enough, good British actors - such as Kenneth Branagh and Jeremy Irons - want eventually to play all the parts at once, as though bravura was a simple matter of multiplicity. Alec Guinness got to be eight people in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and that was witty, while Peter Sellers got to be several people in Dr Strangelove (1963), which was wickedly funny. But these performances depended on something fundamentally comic: actors who play their many parts for non-laughs are apt to cancel themselves out. Or worse.
Sunshine is the story of three generations of a Jewish family in Budapest. It stars Ralph Fiennes, who kindly forgoes the part of the cleaning lady, but who sports several kinds of moustache and a brace of haircuts as he sets out to portray the inner and outer lives of the leading man of each generation of the Sonnenschein family. As Ignatz Sonnenschein (Fiennes with wavy hair), he falls in love with his adopted sister, Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), a lively, warm-hearted girl who refuses to be bound by tradition.
After changing his surname to the non-Jewish-sounding Sors, Ignatz advances quickly as a lawyer, and eventually becomes chancellor to the Emperor of Hungary. Meanwhile Ignatz's brother Gustave (James Frain) grows increasingly involved with Communism. Fiennes eventually brings the life of Ignatz Sors to a close - at the end of the First World War he is a desperate, despoiled servant of a deposed Emperor, and yesterday's man.
One of the things this very ambitious film tries to do is to depict the decline and fall of a certain kind of mitteleuropean family. There are many scenes of family bliss - or upset - at the large dinner table, and throughout the film reference is made to a family recipe for a drink called Sunshine, which becomes a kind of hallowed symbol of domestic continuity and familial comforts. The recipe for the drink is lost early in the film and is never found again. In a small chamber-piece this might have worked poetically; in this tattered, baggy monster of a film it just seems cute. It is one of those very conservative movies in which people just seem to get more and more lost and sentimental with the ravages of time.
Enter Adam Sors (Fiennes with slicked-down hair), who has a cruel look about him, and who distinguishes himself by becoming a fencing champion at the German Olympics of 1936. Fiennes is quite captivating here: he's always strongest as an actor when combining a will to power with a slow acceptance of humiliation (see his current stage performance as Richard II at the Gainsborough Studios in east London, or his ace turn last year in Onegin). Despite his father's war record and his own Olympic glory, Adam is identified as a Jew and sent to a camp. His son Ivan sees his terrible end.
History epics - like hastily commissioned symphonies - often lose their way in the third movement. This is because they are too keen to tie things up and make what you have seen and heard mean something grand in the round. Sunshine loses all proportion as it reaches into the Cold War period: ambitious for the end of history, it wants to bring these lives, with all their glories and suffering and errors, to some kind of conclusion. But there is no conclusion. There is only more glory and suffering and error.
Young Ivan Sors (Fiennes with a fringe) turns up at the family home as someone wise about the terrors of fascism. (His arrival raises a not-unexpected laugh with the audience.) Quickly we see him come to hate Communism too, and hate the lies of the past; as he changes his name back to Sonnenschein, we know that it is only a matter of time before he mounts a tank to make speeches in the Hungary of 1956.
Sunshine raises a whole lot of questions about performance and acting. On this point, Jennifer Ehle is a very rare and lovely performer. She brings a complicated freshness to every scene she is in. In fact this week your soaraway Telegraph film page announces a competition: The Would Someone Please Write A Good Leading Role for Jennifer Ehle Competition. There are two prizes - first, you get to feel you've done something important in Western culture, and second, you get sent at least a half dozen leftover Easter eggs. This is serious. Why are there no leading parts for excellent young women?
Fiennes's performance is a three-cornered hat: it is too broad and cumbersome to be elegant, and it sometimes surrenders gravity to the pantomimic. Yet he has the kind of flickering intelligence that is good to watch on the screen. Even with unhelpful material, and a difficult scheme, Fiennes will offer unexpected pockets of humanity. The fencing scenes, some of the early scenes of affection between him and Valerie, and his unimpeachable bearing as he faces his torturers in the concentration camp, reveal an actor far in advance of the multiple self-impersonations of Branagh, Irons, or even Sellers. It is simply the case that he finds himself in an unwieldy movie - a movie in search of a spurious finality.
Time is expected to both repeat itself and be undone in a film like this. Director István Szabó' Szabó is committed to beauty and truth, and, seeing Sunshine, there are many benefits in this regard. But history will not yield to the shaping urge of nostalgia: his film displays none of the chaos of time and love, only a yearning for each to resolve itself in a final meaning for the present.
Szabó's film is an illustration of the forgivable arrogance of art, and of those who would mean to make it. He wants European history to come to a place of final certainties, a sunny place beyond further threat and revision. But time will not work like that. Not even in the movies. We die and make way for other fools. That is the only certainty.
Back to Sunshine Article Index