Sunshine


Sunshine
By Andrew Pulver
Guardian Unlimited
April 28, 2000


Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, of Mephisto and Colonel Redl renown, has been pretty quiet this decade. With Sunshine , a three-hour chronicle of three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, he's making a play for the grandeur and sweep of his earlier work.

Ralph Fiennes plays the key character in each segment. First he's the studious Ignatz Sonnenschein, who changes his name to Sors to get on in the judiciary in the twilight years of the Hapsburg empire. Next, he plays Adam Sors, a fencing champion dragged helplessly down by Hungary's interwar fascism and the Nazi invasion. Finally, he's Ivan Sors, functionary in the postwar Communist regime, who changes his name back after the 1956 uprising.

Szabo's movie offers an absorbing potted history of his native country, but the whole thing stands or falls on Fiennes' performance. This, truth to tell, only partly succeeds: he seems much the happiest in his second incarnation as cavalier sabre-waver Adam, and struggles to impersonate plausibly either a turn-of-the-century Jewish son, or a browbeating Communist interrogator.







 

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