In Review: 'Sundown,' 'Charli XCX: Alone Together'

Life's a beach for Tim Roth in the surprising, enigmatic 'Sundown' while Charli XCX stays indoors to record a quarantine album in five weeks.

Sundown
Dir. Michel Franco
83 min.

The vacation is going beautifully until fate strikes from abroad. As the younger members of their family enjoy all the pleasures of a luxurious Acapulco resort, Neil (Tim Roth) and Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) sip margaritas and enjoy moments of sunshine and rest. Then the phone rings and everything changes. Alice learns first that her mother has been unexpectedly hospitalized and then receives news of her death. As the family races to the airport, Neil tells Alice he’s accidentally left his passport behind, compounding what’s already a terrible day. She agrees, however reluctantly, to go on ahead as he heads back to retrieve it and catch the next plane out.

Except he’s lying. With passport safely in hand, Neil returns to town, takes a room in a shady motel, heads to the beach to drink beer by the bucket and, almost more by accident than by design, takes up with Bernice (Iazua Larios), a fetching local who works at a souvenir stand. Clearly this is a man in the grips of a serious mid-life crisis. Except he’s not. Written and directed by Michel Franco (After Lucia), Sundown plays against viewers’ assumptions, including the nature of Neil and Alice’s relationship and Neil’s ultimate plans for his Mexican getaway. Franco plays fair. Neil is a man who callously abandons his family in its time of need. But that’s not the whole story.

The mystery of that whole story is part of what makes Franco’s deliberately paced (yet short) film gripping, but Sundown rests on Roth’s performance, a cryptic, laid back turn in which his unstirring expression matches his untucked vacation wear. Roth’s every gesture suggests a man letting life happen to him rather than trying to steer it in one direction or another. He’d rather sit than walk. He’s happy to say as little as possible. He’s grateful Bernice came his way but never sought to draw her. Above all, he wants to be on the beach.

Life doesn’t always want him there, however. Franco has drawn criticism in Mexico for his depiction of his homeland, and Sundown seems unlikely to change that. (Acapulco: Come for the waves, stay for the jet ski assassinations.) But, in the end, the violence that eventually circles around Neil looks like a distraction in a film more interested in what’s brought him to this point, and in the glimpses of sadness that Roth lets float to the surface when Neil forgets to maintain the pose that hides his inner life from the world. —Keith Phipps

Sundown is opening in limited release tomorrow.

Charli XCX: Alone Together
Dir. Bradley & Pablo
67 min.

On her fifth day of isolation during the pandemic, the British pop star Charli XCX likens the stay-at-home order to snow days, though she admits it can get “a bit existential.” By the eighteenth day, she’s gathered her online friends, called “The Angels,” to announce that she’s going to record an entire album in quarantine and have it ready to drop in five weeks. She’ll also solicit fans for lyrics and artwork. And shoot videos at home with her boyfriend. And make a feature documentary out of the whole process. While the rest of us were making sourdough starter, Charli XCX was opening a bakery. 

On the “To Do” list for the album—her fourth, called How I’m Feeling Now and released on May 15th, 2020, exactly the date she promised— the movie part feels a few too many items down. In her DIY conceit, Charli XCX: Alone Together stands as a replacement for a standard promotional reel, despite the intimacy of Charli and her boyfriend, Huck Kwang, keeping the handheld cameras (and phones) rolling at all times. There are enough fascinating glimpses into Charli’s obsessive song craft to make you wish that the film could focus entirely on the act of creation, rather than behaving like an extension of a marketing campaign. Alone Together may be markedly less slick than the Disney+ performance documentary for Taylor Swift’s “Folklore”—to cite another example of a quarantine overachiever—but the two are not different animals. 

With the tight deadline she’s set for herself, Charli immediately unboxes the microphones and cameras she has delivered to her home in Los Angeles, and at one point orders a cheap green screen off Amazon to make a music video for the single “Claws.” The best that can be said of the documentary’s short attention span is that it reflects a seemingly borderless life where work, downtime, and social media engagement are each an extension of the other: Charli gets feedback from the Angels on artwork and lyrical fill-ins, suffers bouts of depression and uncertainty in private, and turns all of it into the techno-pop songs she’s constantly refining. Would it even be possible to make a version of Alone Together entirely about the recording process without filtering out the other noise that swirls around her? Maybe not. 

Cultivating fanbases is a big part of our hive-based pop click-onomy, and Alone Together goes strenuously far in positioning Charli as an LGBTQ+ icon, the musical locus for a community that often feels alienated, especially during a pandemic that relegates many to their rooms. She presents herself as an accessible star and appears genuinely to think of her relationship with fans as a personal and creative dialogue. But there’s still this nagging sense that the film is part of a feedback loop, soliciting fans for ideas in order to sell this packaged record of their fandom back to them. The line between fake and real intimacy is a blurry one. (Though at least Charli is getting something from fans. Huck mostly wears hoodies and scrolls through his phone, looking bored.) 

Still, it’s hard not to marvel at Charli’s drive and musical wizardry during those precious scenes when Alone Together puts them on vivid display. One moment, she’s singing her voice ragged into a microphone, developing lyrics on the fly; the next, she’s listening to playback on a laptop, doing line-by-line edits on various takes. How I’m Feeling Now is a special album, a snapshot of a time in her life—and everyone else’s lives—where she had to figure out how to adjust to a new four-walled reality. Her dance-y, sexy, sad music made the best of a bad situation. — Scott Tobias

Charli XCX: Alone Together will open in limited release and on Hulu tomorrow.