Nemes and Reygadas Split the Critics

Dispatching to Filmmaker, Giovanni Marchini Camia argues that Sunset is “genuinely great,” and he isolates a single scene that encapsulates the dizzying experience of watching the film. “Irisz simply walks into a duchess’s palace uninvited, witnesses a murder literally the second she steps through the door, and in the next moment a torch-wielding mob storms the property, perfectly framed through the window Irisz happens to be standing next to. It’s an amazing spectacle, just not a very likely one, especially when virtually every scene involves such elaborate construction and choreography. Actually, the film doesn’t at all intend to be realistic.”

Jonathan Romney agrees, adding in his review for Film Comment that “Sunset is historical fiction as phantasmagoria—a whirlwind of incident, involving conspiracy and criminal actions in society high and low.” It’s also “possibly the most disorienting and obscure—make that ‘exhilaratingly obscure’—narrative film since Alexei German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, and the comparison lies partly in the way that Nemes saturates the screen with movement and detail, but often makes it impossible to read what he’s showing us.” And he means that in a good way.

Writing in the Notebook, Yaron Dahan sees in Sunset “a foreboding, if not a warning for the future. It is no accident that this second film begins at the moment just prior to Europe’s lurch into bloodied chaos, so alike to today’s Europe, pregnant with anger and uncertainty.” Others, though, like Jessica Kiang, reviewing Sunset for Sight & Sound, find the film “lavish, luxurious, and completely ludicrous”; it’s an “unforgivably overlong, maddeningly self-serious opus.” Noting that Nemes has said that he’s looked to Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) for inspiration, Variety’s Jay Weissberg writes that F. W. Murnau’s silent classic “was grounded in human emotions buffeted by modernity, whereas Nemes jettisons all but a simulacrum of humanity in favor of a questionable subjectivity.” And writing for Cinema Scope, Dominik Kamalzadeh finds that Sunset is “so sparse on information that its dramaturgy of a deferred uncovering soon seems more like mannerism.”

In Our Time, Reygadas and his wife, editor Natalia López, play Juan and Ester, a couple who decide to open up their marriage. But when Ester strikes up an affair with another man, Juan cannot handle it. As Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov points out, “the premise isn’t a huge change of pace: for all its Dreyer trappings, Silent Light is an adulterous love triangle, and Reygadas’s manic peak Post Tenebras Lux made one of its self-contained set pieces a visit to a swingers’ retreat. The man’s work is nothing if not sexually, let’s say, adventurous.” But Rizov’s problem is primarily the formal rut the filmmaker’s fallen into. As he sees it, “five features in, Reygadas appears to have settled on an aesthetic toolbox with a set number of shot possibilities.” In a word, for Rizov, Our Time is simply “annoying.”

For Leonardo Goi, writing in the Notebook, Our Time, which runs just short of three hours, by the way, “is a film whose individual parts function better than the whole. There is plenty of room to criticize it as an endurance test, but glossing over the wonders nestled inside it would be a myopic disservice.” So far, Our Time’s most enthusiastic champion is Giovanni Marchini Camia. Writing for Sight & Sound, he calls it a “soul-searching work of scorching honesty that functions both as an anatomy of love and marriage, and as an evisceration of masculinity.” Yes, it can be “a relentless, harrowing viewing experience but also, ultimately, a cathartic one. As such, Reygadas and López’s willingness to lay themselves bare in this manner, without embellishment or facile absolution, represents a deeply generous gesture.”

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