Hungarian Upheaval, Family Entwined in ‘Sunshine’

With the monumental three-hour “Sunshine,” master director Istvan Szabo relates the tragic and turbulent history of Hungary in the 20th century. The story is told through the Sonnenscheins, an assimilated Jewish family whose last survivor finally accepts the futility of trying to deny one’s roots--especially when he realizes that that is all he has left.

It is a superb period re-creation and boasts a formidable international cast acting in English but does not attain the high artistic level of Szabo’s great trilogy exploring the theme of self-deception, “Mephisto, “Colonel Redl” and “Hanussen.”

Szabo and his co-writer, playwright Israel Horovitz, tend to match every upheaval in Hungarian life with tempestuous behavior on the part of the Sonnenscheins, particularly the three generations of scions played by Ralph Fiennes. The constant compounding of personal and political turmoil is soap operatic in effect, which makes you feel that “Sunshine” would play best as a TV miniseries. It is nevertheless absorbing and illuminating in regard to the eras its spans but is also pretty wearying by the time it starts winding down. However, those of us who are steadfast admirers of Szabo--and also suckers for traditional-style period epics--wouldn’t want to miss it.

“Sunshine,” which is English for Sonnenschein, prophetically opens (in 1840) with an explosion in the herbal distillery of a rural tavern-keeper, killing him and his entire family except for his 12-year-old son, Emmanuel. The boy heads for Budapest with his father’s secret recipe for his “Sunshine” herbal tonic, which will become the basis for the family fortune that affords the Sonnenscheins a palatial mansion. Their story begins in earnest with the dawn of the 20th century, at which time the sons of Emmanuel (David de Keyser) and Rosa (Miriam Margolyes), Ignatz (Ralph Fiennes) and Gustave (James Frain), have settled on careers in law and medicine, respectively. They have been raised with their orphaned cousin, Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), an aspiring photographer and free spirit who defiantly and successfully seduces Ignatz, whom she marries.

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Under the rule of Emperor Franz Joseph, Hungarian Jews were granted unprecedented opportunities and civil rights, and the dashing Ignatz rises fast through the ranks of jurisprudence but must change the family name (to Sors, pronounced Sorsh) if he is to go all the way to the top. He’s so grateful to the emperor that he refuses to notice that the government is growing ever weaker and more corrupt, with the lower classes left in such dire straits that Gustave becomes a Communist in protest.

The outbreak of World War I, the deaths of the emperor and his father on the very same day, and Valerie’s disillusionment with him ensure an early grave for Ignatz. Hungary goes briefly Communist until taken over by Admiral Horthy’s military regime, which ultimately collaborated with the Nazis. With the end of World War II, Hungary would endure Communist rule until 1989.

It is unclear whether in the wake of World War I the Sunshine Tonic is still being manufactured, but in any event the Sonnenscheins continue living in style in the family mansion. Ignatz’s son Adam, a dedicated assimilationist and superb fencer, leads Hungary to triumph at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, returning home a national hero and no more willing to see where the country is heading than his late father, Ignatz, was in his time.

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Only Adam’s sister-in-law Greta (Rachel Weisz) sees that the family needs to emigrate before it’s too late. Needless to say, Adam’s heroic status will mean nothing once the deportations of Hungarian Jews commence. Valerie (Rosemary Harris, having taken over for Ehle, her real-life daughter) and Adam’s son Ivan survive the Holocaust, with Ivan turning Stalinist inquisitor in his mood for vengeance but emerging a hero of the futile 1956 Hungarian uprising. Ivan, too, is seduced--by an aggressive apparatchik (Deborah Kara Unger).

With his clenched intensity, Fiennes is well-cast as a series of single-minded, self-absorbed innocents who are pursued by women rather than pursuing them. The film is anchored by Ehle and Harris, equally luminous as Valerie, who possesses the strength and wisdom of a woman who always dared to be true to herself. Margolyes makes a put-upon, tradition-minded matriarch sympathetic because she can be amusing and common-sensical in her candor.

William Hurt is commanding as a man who survives Auschwitz only to meet a worse fate at the hands of rabid Stalinists, and Rudiger Vogler is an elegant and subtle Hungarian general. (Vogler in middle age recalls Melvyn Douglas at his most urbane, which is a long way from the hippie drifters Vogler played in Wim Wenders’ early films.) Lajos Koltai’s cinematography is glorious, as usual, and Maurice Jarre is the ideal composer for a stirring epic. Although the lives of the three generations of Sonnenscheins come across as melodramatic rather than tragic, “Sunshine” is a film of many redeeming virtues.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong sexuality and for violence, language and nudity. Times guidelines: The fascist and communist brutalities depicted are standard for films depicting the various historic periods, whereas the sex is unusually steamy and candid.

‘Sunshine’

(‘Sonnenschein’)

Ralph Fiennes: Ignatz, Adam and Ivan

Rosemary Harris: Older Valerie

Jennifer Ehle: Young Valerie

William Hurt: Andor Knorr

A Paramount Classics release of an Alliance Atlantis and Serendipity Point Films in association with Kinowelt presentation. Director Istvan Szabo. Producers Robert Lantos, Andras Hamori. Executive producers Rainer Kolmel, Jonathan Debin. Screenplay Szabo and Israel Horovitz; based on an original story by Szabo. Cinematographer Lajos Koltai. Editors Michel Arcand, Dominique Fortin. Music Maurice Jarre. Costumes Gyorgyi Szakacs. Production designer Attila F. Kovacs. Art director Zsuzsanna Borvendeg. Key set decorator Tommy Vogel. Running time: 3 hours.

At selected theaters.