Night of the Sunflowers

Is it actually possible that the Coen brothers, while in the process of scripting a movie like, say No Country For Old Men or Miller’s Crossing somehow got lost in a village in Spain, trading their way out in return for one of their scripts, and that script has made it out today into a brilliant thriller, so reminiscent of their style, only this time at the hands of an unknown Spanish filmmaker, in fact his very first directorial venture?? Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo seems very denying, though. He could have, with such a prized script approached any big production house and claimed fame to someone else’s ingenuity. Why then, did he decide to start his work from where he finds himself at home, i.e. rural Spain? Why cast a bunch of unknown actors into a promising script? And what on earth made him venture so far out into the desolateness that he claims, is the becoming of the smaller villages within Spain? Perhaps, there lies an ulterior motive in this brilliant script. And perhaps he did, after all script the movie himself. It’s an insult to any American cinephile, who has no conceptual idea that countries across the Atlantic also make movies, and better ones too.

Night of the Sunflowers is not necessarily a character study. We simply have here, a series of unfortunate events that results out of a meeting by chance, between a rapist and murderer, and his next victim. The rapist will try to victimize a young woman, and who she is and where it all takes place play a decisive part in the violent events that will ensue. So this movie has several strong points. One of them is showing how someone completely unrelated to the rest of the main characters of the story, someone who meets one of those people (the young woman) by chance, can be the trigger for all we're about to see. Then, the structure is very attractive too, as the director tries to make full portraits of each important character and show us, not only what they're doing there, but where they come from, in every sense; he shows us what that person is like, their personality and motivations, and what they want, basically; then he drops that character into the spiral of events that have been started by the attack to the young woman, and so comes this suspenseful story, involving two speleologists, the girlfriend of their leader, a very honest and stern old cop and a dishonest, corrupt young one, and two old men who live in an otherwise derelict village.

Jorge Sánchez’s script takes us on a trail of deceit and murder, edging us to rationalize the circumstances in which these incidents take place. We somehow do exactly that, with no remorse as to the consequences, in the light of what we think is significant or obscure. All that rationalization later makes us feel guilty in a brilliant epiphany towards the end. Somehow, the source of all the evil here is shown as what comes with the arrival of outsiders into an otherwise placid village life. The difference between the natives and the townsfolk is so apparent; it’s literally chalked in black and white. On a later introspection, it is exactly this difference which boils down the series of crimes -unknowingly committed- to what is right and what is wrong. Somehow, we find ourselves at the receiving end of a basic moral instinct which we uphold when faced with a more societal setting. And that, according to Jorge Sánchez is a more obstinate, impervious and obscene act than the real crime we see here.