Sparrows Are Birds Too
Sparrows Are Birds Too
A veréb is madár
1968, colour, 79 mins
- Director: György Hintsch
- Writers: Balázs Farkas, István Kállai
- Camera: István Hildebrand
- Editing: Sándor Zákonyi
- Design: Béla Zeichan
- Music: Attila Dobos
- Cast: László Kabos (Zoltán/Sándor Holló); Ádám Szirtes (manager); Ildikó Piros (Blondie); Ilona Medveczky (Helén); Ferenc Kállai (co-worker); László Csurka (hotel manager); Hilda Gobbi (interpreter)
If I had to recommend one 1960s Hungarian comedy, it would almost certainly be Péter Bacsó’s brilliant The Witness (A tanú, 1969), one of only two films that were singled out by Tibor Fischer’s notoriously splenetic rant (in The Guardian, 7 October 2006) as exceptions to the general rule that Hungarian films were immensely tedious. Its scintillating anti-Stalinist satire cut so close to the bone that it was banned until the early 1980s, but has since become an indelible part of Hungarian popular culture.
But those who’ve enjoyed Bacsó’s film and fancy something in a similar vein could do a lot worse than sample György Hintsch’s Sparrows Are Birds Too, made the previous year. Although much of it is gently amusing rather than side-splittingly hilarious (at least to someone entirely dependent on the subtitles), it shares a similar cheekiness in its constant mockery of certain aspects of Hungarian life, especially vis-à-vis its capitalist counterparts. Right from the start, fun is poked at the difficulties encountered by Hungarians in leaving their country (Sándor Holló cunningly joins an Austria-versus-Hungary cycle race just before a legitimate border crossing, and from there emigrates to California), and it goes on to derive humour from the absurdities of socialist bureaucracy, the desire for hard currency over the soft local variety, and the special treatment meted out to foreign VIPs at the expense of the locals (an entire conference of academics has to share a hotel room in order to free up two luxury suites for what the hotel considers to be a better class of guest).
In the most telling scene, a striptease is constantly interrupted by a burly maitre d’, announcing that certain groups of people are not entitled to see any more - first, the Hungarians (naturally), then the Czechs, Russians and East Germans, until only the Americans are left. Even more tellingly, the guests are defined by their currency rather than their nationality - indeed, this set-piece is known as the Hard Currency Striptease.
The plot is a series of variations on that age-old theme of mistaken identity based around Sándor having an identical twin brother, Zoltán (both played by László Kabos, a kind of ginger Hungarian Woody Allen). The latter is a humble factory worker and part-time inventor, who fails to attract much interest in his revolutionary cleaning device, to the consternation of his implausibly attractive girlfriend Szöszi (Ildikó Piros), whose name translates literally as ‘Blondie’. When Sándor returns to his native country for the first time in fifteen years as a successful businessman, he naturally reunites himself with Zoltán - who opportunistically steals his coveted US passport and whisks Blondie off for a lavish weekend at his brother’s expense. (She is under the impression that he is Sándor, having decided that the latter is far more dynamic and exciting).
Most of this is extremely silly, and any doubts that this is essentially a slapstick farce are eliminated when someone crashes through a hotel room door, leaving a neatly cut-out hole matching his shape. But Kabos copes well with his dual role (and a surprising amount of split-screen trickery to make both brothers appear on screen at once), even though it’s not always obvious which brother is which at any given moment. Other nifty set-pieces include a tour of a hotel where assorted flunkeys are frantically rolling up the red carpet behind the distinguished visitors, rushing up the back stairs and unrolling it on the upper floor just in time, or anti-capitalist billboards being replaced by far more US-friendly ones in a matter of seconds. There’s also a surprising amount of near-the-knuckle eroticism, including topless female nudity on more than one occasion and two scenes that come perilously close to going further, with only a feather boa protecting the actress’s modesty. No classic, then, but fun in parts.
DVD Distribution: Mokép (Hungary), PAL, region 2
Picture: Mostly excellent, sourced from a very well preserved print whose only small problem consists of faint blue vertical streaks at around the 41-minute mark. Otherwise, this was fine - if anything, it’s a bit too sharp at times, as it’s occasionally possible to spot the very faint join in the middle of the split-screen special effects needed to let Lászlo Kabos act opposite himself. The picture is framed at what I presume is the original 4:3 (there’s no compositional suggestion that it should be anything else), and slightly windowboxed on all sides, presumably to compensate for television overscan.
Sound: This is the original mono, and sounded fine - no better than I’d expect for a nearly 40-year-old film, but certainly no worse.
Subtitles: Generally more than adequate, with very few typos - though there’s one slightly misleading one where the hotel manager refers to “old guests” when the context makes it clear that he means “odd”.
Extras: Extras are Hungarian-language only, and consist of filmographies for the director and star. These contain four buried trailers, all unsubtitled.
Links
- BFI Film and TV Database
- Internet Movie Database
- Reviews: Dan Pavlides (All Movie Guide)
Posted on 30th August 2007
Under: Reviews, Hungary, György Hintsch | No Comments »
I’d been meaning to watch The Revenge (Zemsta, 2002) for ages - it’s Andrzej Wajda’s last completed feature prior to this year’s Katyń - and after other plans fell through last night I gave it a go. It’s a mixed bag: on the one hand, it’s hugely entertaining seeing two great directors clearly letting their hair down and having a ball (Roman Polański being the other - he’s playing the lead role), and as a farcical costume romp it worked very well.
I was lucky enough to see Hukkle without any advance warning - my editor handed over a VHS tape and suggested that it might be my sort of thing. It was. Like most viewers, I found it highly disconcerting at first, but once I’d grasped the principle that it essentially extended the concept of Microcosmos and similar natural history documentaries to encompass the human occupants of a small village, I took to it immediately. On the one hand, the notion that human beings have no greater significance in the wider scheme of things than ants, snakes, frogs and cats is deeply pessimistic and cynical (though, as Taxidermia amply demonstrates, wholly consistent with Pálfi’s apparent worldview), but on the other, it’s no more than the simple truth. 
There seems little doubt that the film was deliberately made to be as provocative and taboo-breaking as possible, with particular attention paid to graphic depictions of assorted bodily functions. In the first story, we have graphic masturbation, ejaculation (fire as well as semen) and copulation (with a thankfully dead pig as well as a live woman), the second dwells on speed-eating and equally copious vomiting (I said in my Sight & Sound review that the characters here made Monty Python’s notorious Mr Creosote look genteel), while the third is concerned with the body’s complete breakdown, either through terminal obesity or self-administered taxidermy. I originally reviewed the film off a timecoded DVD screener, but seeing it on the big screen with a small but vocal audience added a whole new dimension - I have this mental image of Pálfi staging loads of preview screenings and timing the gross-out moments to match the audience response.
Hukkle has had quite a few English-friendly DVD editions. Despite my endorsement on the box (of the film, not the disc), the worst appears to be Soda Pictures’ UK edition (region 2 PAL), reviewed by DVD Times 
Ludzie w drodze
The next day, work starts early in the middle of a large field. A trainer climbs into the cage with three muzzled bears. The men band together to erect the marquee, pushing the supporting poles into place. Makeshift kitchens and bathrooms are constructed in the open air. A monkey licks the juices off a slice of lemon. The horses are tethered on a long enough leash to allow them to run around. High-wire and trapeze artists, acrobats and unicyclists, gingerly rehearse their acts. Around all this, family life maintains a semblance of normality: mothers wash clothes and hang them on the line as children play, or pop into the marquee to gawp at the performers, getting a sneak preview before the audience proper arrives. Crowds gather, and wait in anticipation. And then the start of the performance is announced, the audience applauds, the music strikes up… and the film ends.
Three sequences run longer than average. In the first, an acrobat dresses himself, smoking a cigarette throughout, while balancing on his head - which he does with such quiet serenity and seeming obliviousness of the world around him that it’s easy to share Karabasz’ rapt fascination. The second extended sequence involves a montage of children’s faces as they wait for the performance to begin: it’s a study in anticipation and growing excitement as they peer over rails to try to get the best vantage point. And finally, there’s the elaborate sequence of pre-performance preparation, as make-up is applied, costumes adjusted and limbs stretched and flexed: we’ve already had a private view, but now they have to face a paying public, and the anxiety on the faces of some of these seasoned professionals is palpable. With barely a word of dialogue (and none of it important), Karabasz gives us a vivid glimpse of the lives of these people, and by the end we understand better why they choose to live such a nomadic and eccentric existence. 
Muzykanci
Then again, we don’t need to be, as the sheer joy of what they’re doing is obvious from the film itself. The high-contrast opening shots in the tram workshop have a hint of archetypal Socialist Realism about them, but they’re too brief to make any didactic point: they merely establish that these men are not professional musicians and are all performing voluntarily. According to Mikołaj Jazdon’s notes in the PWA set, the elaborately-moustachioed conductor has “a melodic Vilnius accent”, and his native country has a 
The rehearsal proper begins with a French horn duet, and is almost immediately interrupted by the conductor. After a few tweaks to the volume and synchronisation, they start again, getting only a few bars further before the conductor complains that they’re out of tune. More adjustments, with tuba player Zygmunt’s staccato phrasing coming in for particular attention. Finally, the musicians get to play uninterrupted, and Niedbalski’s camera discovers a new-found freedom, gliding from player to player, pausing to dwell on close-ups of pursed lips over mouthpieces and fingers over keys. As the tempo increases, the camera stops moving and the cutting speeds up. But just as the music is about to reach a climax, Karabasz cuts to a slow pan around the deserted tram workshop, the music becoming muffled and distant. This unexpectedly low-key ending, at precisely the point where one would normally expect some kind of triumphalism (or at the very least an affirmative commentary making some kind of social or political point), underscores the film’s key theme: these men aren’t playing music for fame or fortune, they’re doing it for love. What more needs to be said?
Jak co dzień…
The vehicle of choice (90% of commuters, apparently) seems to be the electric train, for good reason: it’s by far the fastest and most efficient system of transport, needing only sixty seconds at each stop. At this point, the focus of the film changes from the commuter to the workers behind the scenes, with Karabasz emphasising how much work is required to ensure this sometimes misleading appearance of seamless efficiency. As the commentary puts it: if you’re minded to complain about a 10-minute delay, you have these people to thank for ensuring that it was that brief. Delightfully old-fashioned mechanical phones allow communication up and down the line, vital in case anything goes wrong. “As a passenger you have no idea what a rascal you are travelling on”, says the commentator, before highlighting the 603 train as being particularly troublesome.
Mikołaj Jazdon comments in the booklet accompanying PWA’s DVD release that “it is astounding that not a trace of the all-prevailing Socialist Realism can be found in his theme, approach, commentary or filming methods”, and it also stands apart from trends in many mainstream British documentaries of the time. I recently watched a brace of National Coal Board newsreels from the late 1940s and 1950s whose raw material is sometimes not dissimilar to Karabasz’s, but the commentator is determined to shoehorn everything into an explicitly pro-NCB propagandist line - and Karabasz could easily have turned his film in to a paean of praise for the Polish railway system merely by changing one or two sentences. That he didn’t gives some hint of the direction his career would take, though later films drop the commentary altogether.
I’ve just watched two Polish films from 2003 back to back. The first, The Body (Ciało), was the first film by the directing duo of Tomasz Konecki and Andrzej Saramonowicz, whose follow-up Testosterone (Testosteron, 2007) I watched last week. In general, the earlier film is superior: much tighter at 94 minutes, funnier and better structured, though still hopelessly indebted to Quentin Tarantino - here, the narrative broken up into out-of-sequence stories is a direct lift from Pulp Fiction, and in case that wasn’t obvious they also throw in a truly shameless scene in which two criminals pass the time by (over-)analysing ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’. But there’s a lot else to enjoy here in this tale of a corpse that keeps popping up where it’s least expected (or wanted) thanks to a series of farcical misunderstandings involving Siamese twins (protected from the law by virtue of the fact that only one is a criminal), a schoolgirl assassin and a police sergeant obsessed with varieties of pasta. The DVD is on the SPI International Polska label, and is fine, offering a good anamorphic transfer with idiomatic English subtitles. Extras are in Polish.
The other film was Symmetry (Symetria), the directing debut of Konrad Niewolski, most of which is set in a six-man remand cell whose inhabitants are awaiting the outcome of their trial. In the case of twentysomething Łukasz (Arkadiusz Detmer), he firmly believes he will be acquitted on the grounds of mistaken identity, but he took a fellow inmate’s advice to get banged up with hardcore career criminals on the grounds that there’s more genuine honour amongst them than elsewhere in the prison. Little in the film is especially groundbreaking (it’s part of a long line that includes Scum, The Shawshank Redemption, Escape From Alcatraz, and many others) but Niewolski’s cool, controlled staging and excellent performances keep it watchable to the final scene, whose inevitability doesn’t make it any less tragic. This DVD is also on SPI International Polska, though the transfer this time is non-anamorphic (but otherwise fine). I also felt a bit short-changed by the subtitles - they do a fine job of rendering convincing-looking prison slang, but there were several passages where I felt I was only given a précis rather than a full translation.
We’re All Christs (Wszyscy jesteśmy Chrystusami, d. Marek Koterski, 2006)
Testosterone (Testosteron, d. Andrzej Saramowicz, Tomasz Konecki, 2007)