This superb film by Istvan Szabo is everything one could have hoped for from him. He and Marta Meszaros have been the leading Hungarian film directors for decades. This is his masterpiece. Nearly three hours long (although eight minutes have been cut from the released version for the DVD version), it still seems incomplete, as if it should have been a six-hour television series. It is in the great tradition of German and Central European 'family saga' stories, of which the most famous is the novel 'Buddenbrooks' by Thomas Mann. Although the family in this film is Jewish, named Sonnenschein ('sunshine'), this is absolutely not a holocaust film. There are no scenes in concentration camps, but one extremely harrowing scene at a round-up point for Jews bound for one. If the Jewish theme is anything, it is that of the futility of attempts at assimilation. The Sonnenscheins of Hungary do everything they can to assimilate, changing their name to Sors (a Hungarian name), and even converting to Roman Catholicism. But it is all to no avail. The anti-Semitism is so ubiquitous, so relentless, so maniacal, that all efforts are dashed. However, the Nazi era is just one era in this family saga. We are taken through the Imperial era, and later the Communist Era both pre-1956 and post-1956 up to 'the present'. Ralph Fiennes accomplishes one of the greatest feats possible, of playing three successive generations of men of the same family! He does this with total success, and thereby proves himself a true acting genius. Valerie Sonnenschein/Sors is played when young by Jennifer Ehle, and when old by her real-life mother, Rosemary Harris. It is hard to remember a finer performance by either. Szabo must be a truly inspiring director for his actors. This film was very personal to him, and the huge flat where the Sonneschein/Sors family live is the one where Szabo himself grew up as a child. Bill Paterson delivers a wonderful performance, and as someone who is so quintessentially British, to appear successfully as a Hungarian was an astonishing feat. Rachel Weisz gives an intense and passionate performance, as one would expect from her. The story is original from Szabo, who did the first version of the script, but the final screenplay was evidently by that friend of my youth, Israel (Artie') Horovitz. I still have the hand-mimeographed copy he gave me of what I believe was his first one-act play, 'The Hanging of Emmanuel', asking for my opinion at the time. I can give him one of this film now: if he had done nothing else in his lifetime but write this magnificent screenplay, he could walk tall and proud through all of his days. If only this film could be shown in schools, to educate the ignorant young who now know nothing about what happened more than five minutes ago! This film is a testament, and testaments are what we need above all today when he have a failure of collective memory in society, and when people live only in a present of a few minutes' duration, oblivious of both past and future as if they were dumb beasts or even insensate plants.
Review of Sunshine
