More Clouds than Sun.

Considerable as is the artistic achieve ment of Sunshine, its historical, social, and philosophical importance is greater yet. Compressed into three hours is a family chronicle that could be fully encompassed only by a long novel or TV series. It is the story of the Jewish Sonnenschein family in Hun gary, from the late 19th to the late 20th century.

Aaron Sonnenschein invented a highly profitable herbal elixir named Sunshine, which is what the family name means in German. Aaron's inventiveness also caused his death in an explosion at his Eastern European distillery. His son Emmanuel escapes to Budapest with the formula, where thriving, large-scale business with the elixir makes the family wealthy. As the new century arrives, they naively toast it as an age of peace and prosperity.

The renowned Hungarian director Istvan Szabo made the movie from a script written by himself and the American playwright-scenarist Israel Horovitz. The main thread is the relationship between Jews and Gentiles under various forms of government, and how tolerance and persecution alternated or even coexisted, sometimes lu dicrously, at other times tragically.

Another theme is adherence to or rebellion against ancient Judaic laws. Thus when Emmanuel's son Ignatz falls in love with his orphaned cousin and adoptive sister Valerie, they marry despite intense parental opposition on religious grounds. Then there is the political thread: Ignatz, a liberal imperialist, worships Emperor Franz Joseph; his younger brother, Gustave, outraged by social injustice, turns radical socialist. Valerie, whom both love, stays in the middle as an enlightened Hungarian nationalist.

The question of assimilation is a further thread as the Sonnenscheins, under pressure, change their name to Sors-the Hungarian, as well as the Latin, for fate-with symbolic and also socioeconomic implications. The liberal lawyer Ignatz can thus become a judge, whose politics so alienate Valerie that she leaves him for Gustave, to return only when her husband becomes mortally ill.

Hungary, under its fascist dictator Horthy, drifts ever closer to Nazism. Ignatz and Valerie's older son, Istvan, is a doctor married to the fierce Greta; Adam, the younger, becomes a champion fencer, who, for admission to the elite military fencing club, must convert to Catholicism. Receiving religious instruction with the Sorses is the beautiful Hanna; though already affianced, she falls for Adam's impassioned wooing and superb fencing, and marries him. Adam leads the Hun garian fencing team to a gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, even as Greta, ferociously in love with him, overcomes his staunch sexual resistance.

Despite warnings and job offers from America, Adam, a loyal Hungarian, rejects emigration. A national sports hero, he foresees no danger to Jews until, at the advent of World War II, he and his son, Ivan, end up in the same forced-labor battalion. When Adam refuses to play the groveling Jew to a military bully, he is put to a particularly hideous death while his son, like the others, impotently looks on. Later, Hanna, Istvan, and Greta also perish, but Valerie, as wise as she is good, is hidden by friends and survives.

Ivan witnesses his father's posthumous vindication and, to help ferret out former Nazis, joins the secret police. There follow pell-mell betrayals and remorse, prison and liberation, expropriation and partial reinstatement. Through out, Valerie remains the unwobbling pivot, lending moral support to all, especially to Ivan, and is joined by her son Gustave, back from political exile in France and still a dedicated radical. When she dies serenely in a crowded hospital ward, her silver- tipped cane is left to Ivan. Like the golden pocket watch, passed in Sunshine from fathers to sons, this, too, becomes a symbol: paternal gold and maternal silver.

The film may be a bit fraught with symbols, like those two Meissen cups broken in different times and circumstances, their shards gathered each time with loving care. Valerie takes up photography, often making group portraits of her evolving family. The camera is the eye of history, and justifies inclusion in the film also of technically dissimilar newsreel sequences of momentous occasions.

Some details defy categorization. Early on, Valerie accidentally takes a snapshot of herself removing something (a pebble?) from her bare toes; much later, on a museum visit abroad, the spellbound Adam views the antique statue of the Boy Removing a Thorn, in the same pose as Valerie's in the photograph. For me, this speaks of a confluence of life and art, of eternal recurrence, and of beauty even in painful situations. You must similarly derive your own interpretations of the fate of the black booklet containing the formula of the elixir, and of another significant name change at film's end.

Certain objections to the movie raised elsewhere seem to me unfounded. The brutality of Adam's death shows both the moral victory to be snatched from horrible, humiliating defeat and the permanence of anti- Semitism that, often dormant, never dies. The frequent sex scenes are not gratuitous; the sex, wholesome or not, is life-sustaining. As the great Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, himself a victim of fascism, wrote in a poem, "the taste of kisses in my mouth is now honey, now cranberry": Love making varies pointedly. Ignatz and Valerie's premarital sex is rapturous; Adam's adulterous sex with his sister- in- law, Greta, is the meeting of two diverse furies; Ivan's sex with Major Carola Kovacs, the opportunistic wife of a high-ranking Communist, is, during the time of purges, anguished, frenetic, desperate. Significantly, we never see the lovemaking of Adam and his gentle wife, Hanna.

The New York Times reviewer questioned the film's language, e.g., Ignatz's grantedly cliched postcoital comment to Valerie, "When I'm lying in your arms, I feel I've come home." But consider: The scene is Vienna, where Ignatz is studying and homesick for Budapest; bear in mind, too, the not fully assimilated Jew's hunger for a true home. Besides, this is immediately followed by Ignatz's deflationary "I have to pee," and Valerie's giggly "So do I."

Sunshine enjoys the consistently expert direction of Szabo and the masterly cinematography of Lajos Koltai, a force both in Europe and in Hollywood. The grandmaster of movie music, Maurice Jarre, has composed a score based on Schubert's two-piano Fantasy in F Minor, which we also hear in an orchestral, a one-piano, and, poignantly, one-finger version from a child.

The ultimate triumph is the acting. Ralph Fiennes changes just enough to be equally right, both similar and dissimilar, as Ignatz, Adam, and Ivan; Jennifer Ehle is adorable as the young Valerie; so, too, is her real-life mother, Rose mary Harris, as the older one. Note worthy too are James Frain and John Neville as the youthful and the elderly Gustave, re spectively; Molly Parker (Hanna); Rachel Weisz (Greta); William Hurt as a decent commissar; and the great Hungarian actress Mari Torocsik as an elderly servant. (Torocsik's is a nonspeaking part, for the simple reason that the actress doesn't speak English.) I always have problems with Deborah Kara Unger, but her grasping, fickle Carola is properly predatory.

Sunshine is the cinematic equivalent of what the French call roman fleuve, the novel as a sweeping river. In the present case, the mighty flow more than excuses the footling flaws.