Neil Bennett is enjoying a nice holiday at a Mexican resort with his sister, Alice, and her two teenage kids. They’ve got the sea view and the infinity pool and a hotel entertainer to sing for them over supper. Then all of a sudden, disaster. The phone rings; their mother’s dead. So Neil does what any sensible son would do in his position. He pretends he’s lost his passport and therefore can’t fly home for the funeral. The woman’s dead anyway, so what does she care?
Clearly it’s wrong to laugh at Michel Franco’s brilliant Sundown but I’m afraid that I did all the same – several times while watching the movie; several more times when remembering it afterwards. It’s the funniest film in this year’s Venice competition, also maybe the nastiest, although it never reaches for laughs or disgust and might just as easily be read as a small-scale human tragedy. Sundown shows Neil’s decision, then proceeds to stroll alongside him like an innocent party. It’s an approach that makes the film all the more blackly comic.
No sooner has Neil shoved tear-stained Alice and the kids through the departure gate than he’s away in a cab, bound for downtown Acapulco. Now he’s holed up at the rackety Hotel Camelinas, not taking calls, just living the dream. When Alice returns, a full fortnight later, she finds him drinking beer on the beach with the new girlfriend he picked up at the local bodega. As played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alice speaks for all of us. Her mouth drops open; she throws up her hands. She says, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
This of course is the film’s million dollar question. What on earth is wrong with Neil? Is he sick in the head or an out-and-out sociopath? It turns out that the Bennetts are the fabulously wealthy heirs to a meatpacking business; their lavish holidays funded by industrialised slaughter. But Neil mildly explains that he has no interest in money and is content to survive on a relatively small monthly stipend. He’s unperturbed by his sister’s fury, just as he barely bats an eyelid when he witnesses a gangland execution on the beach. He came to Mexico to relax, after all. At the Hotel Camelinas he appears to have achieved full nirvana.
What an extraordinary performance Tim Roth gives us here, insofar as it qualifies as a performance at all. He ambles through the tale with a placid half-smile, his shoulders slumped, his flip-flops dragging; a hollow man who desires nothing more than to be left alone with his nothingness. So what if he skipped his mum’s cremation and lied to his loving family? He shrugs like a husband who forgot to put out the recycling.
Franco raised hackles here last year with his provocative underclass thriller New Order. Sundown, in its way, is just as transgressive. It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider. Franco does eventually provide us with some good, solid clues as to why Neil acts as he does, although I’m not convinced he really needed to. His film’s at its best when it’s at its most sun-splashed and airy, when it’s hanging with Neil on the beach and watching the man unplug and wind down. He’s lolling in his deckchair without a care in the world; a bottle of beer in his hand, the incoming tide round his ankles.
