100 Sunset: slippery yarn about a teen kleptomaniac revels in discomfort

Kunsang Kyirong’s debut feature 100 Sunset sets the stage with two stolen heirlooms. Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel), a shy but light-fingered Tibetan teen living in a Toronto apartment complex, snatches a mini-DV camera and a precious Dzi stone from her neighbours. The stone, a sacred Himalayan talisman, readily signifies the betrayal of culture and community innate to Kunsel’s misdirected larceny. The camera, still loaded with the intimate memories of the man who owned it, becomes the girl’s third eye, allowing her to peer into the lives of others. Namely, Passang (Sonam Choekyi), an enigmatic young woman who just moved in with her husband across the courtyard.  

The titular property is nestled in northwest Parkdale – home to the continent’s largest population of Tibetan immigrants – though it’s actually located on West Lodge Avenue; the more lyrical-sounding address would place it in a plush Vaughn suburb beyond Toronto’s city limits. Comprising two curved structures that face each other, the building forms a neighbourly panopticon that compounds Kunsel’s dual senses of security and enclosure. This is complemented by the dhukuti, a credit system, originating in Nepal, collectively funded by the residents, paid out to the highest bidder each month. Unified by a long-standing trust, the arrangement strengthens and calcifies this tight-knit community, but also leaves it vulnerable. Enter two women, bound by repression and alienation, looking for a reset. 

At 25, Passang is an object of endless fascination to this 18-year-old voyeur. Her marriage to a man twice her age is a source of attraction and repulsion to the younger woman, who surreptitiously films the couple’s uneasy domestic arrangement, and later, Passang in various states of undress. Their burgeoning friendship teeters on the verge of something inexpressible, and it’s rendered, fittingly, with a bifurcated approach. Most of the film plays out in immaculate 4K, with an static camera that unnervingly roots its characters’ unfixed personae in the architectures of urban ennui (Toronto has always been a good place for it). Footage from the video camera, however, jostles our viewpoint, puncturing the icy remove of its official gaze and allowing us to lurch closer, along with Kunsel.

The prevailing frigidity can frequently hinder this slippery yarn, which arguably falls prey to its own carefully evoked detachment. But there’s a strange, stubborn power to this discomfort, well worth the trudge through 100 Sunset’s occasional redundant passages. The film lingers, like the feeling that you’ve done something wrong, that you’re not in the right place, that the answers can’t be found anywhere in your line of sight.  

► 100 Sunset is in UK cinemas 13 November.