Tim Roth is one of those actors who seems to have been around forever, doesn't change much, doesn't push for the leading roles and yet always leaves an impression.
Now he's in a real starring role, and it's one that confirms everything we think we know about his type.
He plays Neal Bennett, a Brit on vacation in Acapulco.
The first picture shows him in contemplation: he stares at fish dying in the sun.
It is the first vanitas motif in "Sundown" by Mexican director Michel Franco.
The second is a yellow air mattress that Neal floats around in the water with, as if all traces of strength and will had left his body, or even any drive that goes beyond the mere not (yet) wanting to sink.
Neal is accompanied by a beautiful woman named Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and two half-grown children.
The days go by at the infinity pool and with other idleness, the staff at the expensive hotel always have a margarita ready;
Alice occasionally tries to use her phone for work, but is called to order.
This order is called a luxury holiday, until a message comes from home: the mother is ill, an early departure is unavoidable.
Not for Neal.
He stays in Mexico on a pathetic excuse while the rest of the family leaves, surrounded by obliging spirits who show the way past mere mortals at the airport.
What this family is all about still holds one or the other surprise in the episode, that may be the topic of “Sundown” at all.
But before Neal's circumstances gradually become clear, it's best to stay with Tim Roth, who you see very often in the episode on the beach, not with the bikini beauties or with the rock jumpers of Acapulco, but where the common people bathe , on Caletilla Beach.
He lounges in one of the usual plastic chairs, gulps down beer after beer and soon has a local mistress, with whom he has sluggish sex in a cheap hotel room.
Berenice familiarizes him with the local conditions, she keeps the profiteers and swindlers at bay.
The fact that at some point out of the blue a killer provides a few plastic chairs with an order cannot be prevented, but you can easily get over it with another beer.
The new life beyond luxury could go on forever, and that's how Neal might imagine it, if you could get a glimpse of what's going on inside him.
Maybe just nothing.
He simply lets the message tones on his phone, which are increasingly piling up, accumulate, London is far away, his mother's funeral doesn't seem to interest him in the slightest.
Neal has traits of a new Bartleby, who at least exempts one or two passions from his "I'd rather not (anymore)".
Acapulco from behind and below
However, Michel Franco develops “Sundown” with some cool ideas in the direction of a hinted thriller.
It also deals with topics such as "first and not first world", Acapulco becomes a meeting place of the global north with the global south.
Anyway, one of the great aspects of "Sundown" is how this once-glamorous place (also a favorite location where cinema liked to have yachts docked) is seen from behind or from below.
The nature of the wealth that can be served in the expensive resorts in Mexico finally becomes a code for a global society in the example of the Bennetts in which London and Acapulco are just as far apart as a modern-day private jet can fly this distance.
Neal is an heir, and his dormant savagery in Mexico also contains a piece of protest against privilege he never had to do anything about.
But that's another interpretation that Franco certainly suggests, but that he doesn't aim for.
"Sundown" has aspects of a classic B-movie, in which only the bare essentials are told and shown, in which plot points are not a combination of causes, but exactly what they are supposed to be in conventional dramaturgy: turning points, sometimes sudden ones .
The rhythm of "Sundown" has something of the laconicism of a moral fable stripped down to the bare essentials.
Franco reaches his greatest moment of ambiguity towards the end, when he comes to a point where a dramatic event (a diagnosis) coincides with the latent problem (Neal's role in his family, in the economic order, in the world) in such a way that it is no longer possible to decide what is a symptom of what.
It's a brilliant result for a well-sketched film that, at the end of the day, might be remembered as having a kind of stasis behind all storytelling, watching Tim Roth forever play an aversion to events into an event all of its own becomes.