Sunset (Napszállta) and the politics of the period film

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how László Nemes’ Sunset (Napszállta 2018), a drama set in Budapest of the early 1910s, gestures to but problematises the pleasures of ‘heritage space’. The film combines the careful assembly of period mise en scène with a countervailing and systematic attenuation of this reconstruction, achieved through tight framing, shallow focus and extreme focalisation on the protagonist Írisz Leiter. This strategy consigns many of the splendours of Belle Époque Budapest to off-screen or out-of-focus space. I explore how Sunset’s deployment and complication of the visual, and narrative, pleasures of the period film engages critically with attitudes towards history and the past; the resulting response to the film among Hungarian reviewers; and the gender politics of the film. The institutionalised gender abuse behind the beautiful façade of the Leiter hat store and its opulent clients parallels contemporary scandals. Like many period films, Sunset is set on the cusp of change, a moment when ‘the present imagines itself to have been born and history forever changed’. But it refuses to be sealed off as a closed history to be either nostalgically enjoyed or smugly judged at a safe distance from the present.