The Fate Family

And it is here, in this paradox, that Szabo’s vision recovers its potency, and danger, and saves Sunshine from a reductive simplicity. Late in the film, in powerful contradiction to the metamorphoses acted out by Fiennes and the reparative life-energies embodied by Ehle and Harris, we are introduced to a peculiarly forceful character, the Jewish policeman Andor Knorr, played by William Hurt. Knorr comes out of nowhere, and for a time he dominates the film: Auschwitz survivor, moral presence, super-ethical communist, he is a man who was once shot by the Nazis and left for dead, but has been resurrected only to find that he is still being persecuted, this time by the Soviets. Asked to prove that he was shot, he shows the wound in his side, like Christ with doubting Thomas. That Hurt and Szabo manage to give us this moment without corn or undue inflection is a testament to their shared integrity. We‘re never preached to through symbols, but appealed to through metaphor and imagery. Hurt moves with the dreamy alertness of a man freshly awakened in his tomb, and Horovitz gives him a blazing line of 20th-century scripture: ”Auschwitz is our baptism; it’s like a circumcision. Surviving it doesn‘t make a man better or greater. It’s just something that remains inside the brain. You can never keep it out of your thoughts. It defines us.“

The intricate beauty of this fine film comes not of endorsing Christianity at Judaism‘s expense, or vice versa. Nor is its true strength to be found in its tough-minded dismissal of any and all political miracle cures. What makes Sunshine unique, what rewards a first viewing and lives in the mind long thereafter, is that Szabo has attempted to place Judaism and Christianity on a continuum that is both historically truthful and highly personal. Christ is risen, he seems to be suggesting, and what’s more, he‘s still Jewish.