Sundown (Michel Franco, 2021) (Patreon)

While watching Sundown, I was convinced for about an hour that, against all odds, Michel Franco had made a film I sort of liked. Like the earlier Chronic, this film showcases a delicately recessive performance by Tim Roth, and unlike that earlier film, Sundown seemed less concerned with shock tactics and more interested in providing a snapshot of an odd psychological state. While on vacation in Acapulco with his sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her kids, Neil (Roth) learns that his mother has died. When the family leaves Mexico to return to London, Neil pretends to have lost his passport so he can't leave. And for much of the film, we don't know why Neil has made this decision.

The result is a finely tuned observational portrait of a man who, for whatever reason, has decided to abandon his life in favor of bumming around on the beach, sucking back Dos Equis, and almost enjoying the fact that his inability to speak Spanish isolates him from most everyone around. He does meet a woman, Berenice (Iazua Larios), with whom be begins a stilted but seemingly meaningful relationship, and as we learn near the end of the film, Berenice's feelings for Neil are more than genuine.

As usual, Franco's visual style is casual but precise, often shifting in sequential shots between Neil's isolation and crowd scenes, or between spare, linear compositions and teeming activity. The result is a quiet, minor-key film that feels a bit like a Raymond Carver story. We are observing the activity of emotions to which we are mostly denied access, left to wonder who Neil really is and why he is making these unexpected choices. Is he depressed? Suicidal? Trying to get out of the protective bubble of wealth in order to experience something "real"?

Sadly, Michel Franco is Michel Franco all day long, and the final act takes a turn toward the exploitative and preposterous. I get the sense that Franco is grateful to be Mexican, because it gives him political cover to depict his country as a shithole filled with murderous assholes, something no foreign director would ever attempt. As in his other films, Franco gooses Sundown with the shock of random violence, and this seems to give his free-floating, unstructured film an artificial stopping point. (Bang bang.) To be fair, Roth's performance refuses to succumb to Franco's cheap theatrics. Neil remains stoic and inscrutable to the very end. But Sundown, whose ambiguous title turns out to be a bit of a pun, suggests that some filmmakers are so besotted with their own bad-boy brand that they will never evolve or mature. In the words of Daniel Plainview, I'm finished.