Veteran director István Szábo returns to a subject that's obsessed him since he first started minting tales in Budapest in the 1960s, namely his beloved homeland. Sunshine is a romance with Hungary itself: a hoary fable that spans 150 years in the life of the Sonnenschein ("Sunshine") family - proud Jews of peasant stock who are duly battered by Hapsburg imperialism, Nazi terror and Communist tyranny. Big is indeed beautiful in Szábo's eyes. But big can be deceptive too. For such a huge canvas, his film is surprisingly intimate. It's a magnificent piece of pruning. Shot with an economy that belies its three hours, Sunshine tests the family mettle with curses, forbidden passions and betrayals, while the cast paints a glamorous sheen over the great sweep of European history.
Ralph Fiennes plays three generations of dashing Sonnenschein males who claw their way to social respectability by quietly shedding chunks of their Jewish heritage. Ignatz changes his surname to become a powerful judge. Adam converts to Catholicism to win Olympic fencing gold. And Ivan becomes as dementedly extreme as the Hungarian Nazis to assuage his memories of the Holocaust. Fiennes fans are not short-changed. He's a perfect fit for these three uptight idealists, but he gets paid for his eyes. These mesmerising blue marbles - full of sharp cruelties, frustrations and longings - capture subtle shifts of expression and character far better than the lavish tide of costumes and stuffy Budapest interiors.
The price the Sonnenschein men pay for their seemingly innocuous compromises finds a romantic equivalent in forbidden or rotten fruit. Publicly, they are fiendish nationalists. At home they are moral sticklers. In bed they are less than fragrant. Ignatz marries his voluptuous sister (Jennifer Ehle); Adam jilts Molly Parker to wage a torrid affair with his brother's wife (Rachel Weisz); and Ivan has seedy assignations with Debrah Kara Unger over the desk where he interrogates Nazi sympathisers. One of the duties of romantic heroes is to tuck into the cast of leading ladies. Fiennes is great at steaming distance (six inches) but not a natural grappler in the way, say, Oliver Reed grappled. Watching him launch into Ehle, and later, the febrile Weisz, is rather like catching Mr Knightly pawing Emma behind the privet hedge - a decidedly awkward scenario.
It's a small quibble about an otherwise outstanding performance. But it's the small details and tics that make this film such a commanding piece of storytelling. When Ehle announces that she's leaving the priggish Ignatz, she knocks over a china bowl. The broken shards are scrutinised, lovingly picked up, carefully put away. These metaphorical quirks are as artistically charged in their own way as Ignatz's fevered political allegiance to the Emperor, or the calculated anti-Semitism that greets Adam in the fencing room at the Hungarian Officer's Club.
Old newsreel of the First World War, the 1936 Olympics, the Budapest pogroms, the death camps, the Allies' victory parades and the toppling of Stalin's statue is bled into the background. Only in the last chapter does the film come truly alive to the murky compromises that turn ideals into crimes. The brutal murder of Adam - still protesting his credentials as a national hero - by the Nazis inspires Ivan to become an intolerant monster. It takes another tyranny to understand the awful cycle of collusion and patch up what's left of his family. Is it great cinema? A great saga would be nearer the mark. Szábo's chilling 1981 film, Mephisto, is still his masterpiece: a startling, lopsided, angry, but undeniably brilliant tour de force. For all the historical chaff, Sunshine is a picture of restraint and symmetry. The finesse here is how cleverly Szábo makes history personal. But there's a fanatical neatness about it that puts it in the realm of fable, rather than the fabulous.
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