Checking the Gate
As highlighted by my last post, this week sees the launch of the ‘Check the Gate’ festival of recent(ish) Hungarian cinema - and since I’ve now managed to see six-and-a-half out of the seven features being screened, here’s a sneak preview of what’s showing. Given that the festival’s function is to provide a snapshot of what’s been happening in Hungarian cinema over the last half-decade or so, it’s a very impressive selection. All seven films are sharply different in both tone and content, and collectively demonstrate the range of talent that the country has produced in recent years: in virtually all cases, these are first or second features, and most of the filmmakers were born after 1970.
This is what’s showing - for further details on screening times and supporting shorts visit the Curzon Cinemas website.
Kontroll (d. Nimród Antal, 2003) - this wickedly funny and technically assured black comedy is essentially Budapest’s answer to Luc Besson’s Subway (France, 1985), though it’s far less self-conscious and much more entertaining: Antal has already used it as his ticket to Hollywood (where he made motel thriller Vacancy in 2007). Set entirely underground, Kontroll isn’t exactly what you might call an upbeat portrayal of the joys of being a ticket inspector on Budapest’s metro system: the passengers treat them with either indifference, annoyance or open hostility. Small wonder that they while away the time doing less officially-sanctioned things, such as playing chicken on the tracks – but their mettle is put to the test when they get caught up in a murder mystery involving a cowled serial killer pushing passengers in front of approaching trains. Londoners will probably find this subplot especially amusing/alarming, although, sadly, a Tube-based remake is utterly inconceivable (the film opens with a man purporting to represent the Budapest metro, defending his decision to let Antal use it as a location, though this may be as tongue-in-cheek as much of the rest). Lacquer-haired Sándor Csányi is the acting standout as Bulcsú, an inspector with a murky past, and he also pops up as the male lead in…
Just Sex and Nothing Else (Csak szex és más semi, d. Krisztina Goda, 2005) – from the meet-cute opening in which Dóra (Judit Schell) first encounters Tamás (Sándor Csányi) after she’s bustled almost naked out of her lover’s flat, to the final montage of outtakes, this is just as slick and polished a romantic comedy as any of its Hollywood or Richard Curtis-scripted counterparts: it’s no wonder that Goda was quickly snapped up to make the big-budget Children of Glory. It’s been called a Hungarian Bridget Jones’s Diary, which isn’t quite accurate, since the thirtysomething Dóra is more interested in babies than blokes – the title quotes the most enticing bit of the personal ad she ends up placing, which leads to the familiar parade of overly optimistic horrors. No prizes for guessing how it all turns out, but there’s plenty to enjoy along the way, from some genuinely smart dialogue (I’ve never heard avant-garde composer György Kurtág’s name invoked in a one-liner before) and appealing performances, including Zoltán Seress’ accident-prone musician Péter, Károly Gesztesi’s harassed director Paskó, and Antal Czapkó’s Borat-lookalike Turkish waiter Ali, possibly the film’s only genuine romantic. A huge domestic hit, it’s markedly better than the two Polish romantic comedies I’ve seen recently (The Extras and Midnight Talks).
Fresh Air (Friss Levegő, d. Ágnes Kocsis, 2006) – a very promising debut that’s already attracted comparisons with Aki Kaurismäki. These aren’t unfair, but it’s also clear that Kocsis and co-director Andrea Roberti have a highly distinctive style of their own, making particularly inspired use of well-judged décor to fill in the gaps left by the long silences between lonely toilet-cleaner Viola (Júlia Nyakó) and her teenage daughter Angéla (Izabella Hegyi), who have far more in common than either is prepared to admit. Although flame-haired Viola is attractive by any standards, she’s painfully shy and introverted (she goes to singles events but freezes out anyone who gets too close) and devotes her life to her work, constructing an inner sanctum between the male and female toilets that’s practically a home from home, where she experiments with aerosol scent combinations. Meanwhile, Angéla is a troubled teen, if a peculiarly lackadaisical one. She’s certainly unhappy with her home, school and social life to the point of running away from home – or rather, making a token nod in that direction as if to make the gesture without committing herself. Much of the film is very funny in a dryly deadpan (yes, Kaurismäkian) way, but the final scenes have a real emotional wrench.
Hukkle (d. György Pálfi, 2002) – a remarkable calling-card that stands up well even when set against Pálfi’s far more ambitious, lavish and disgusting follow-up Taxidermia. The idea is brilliantly simple: various species that live in, around and even under a Hungarian village are filmed as though for a nature documentary, with the humans given no greater importance than cats, pigs, snakes or beetles (there’s no spoken dialogue, and subtitles are needed only at the very end, when a couple of wedding songs turn out to contain hidden truths). It’s also a murder mystery, albeit a decidedly oblique one, and the first-time viewer is advised to pay as much attention to the background as to anything happening upfront – though this is admittedly not easy when one’s attention is distracted by a pair of swaying porcine testicles the size of watermelons. Given that Pálfi was only just out of film school, it’s an impressively confident piece of work (aurally as well as visually), and even if a couple of the more elaborate CGI flourishes feel a little too much like showing off, he’s clearly shaping up to be one of central Europe’s most distinctive and genuinely original talents. (I discussed Hukkle and Taxidermia in more detail here).
Iska’s Journey (Iszka utazása, d. Csaba Bollók, 2007) – at first glance, this comes across as Hungary’s answer to the grim social realism of Ken Loach or the Dardennes brothers (especially the 1999 Palme d’Or winner Rosetta), though much of this portrait of an all too easily exploited teenage waif is at times closer to outright documentary. Lead actress Mária Varga was originally discovered scavenging for scraps of metal in anticipation of the film’s opening scene, and that’s her real-life sibling on screen as well. Shot entirely hand-held, the film follows Iska’s journey from broken home to sleeping rough (after cadging food from a mine canteen, she’s advised to sleep on the slag heap, as it might still be warm), a stint in a state-run orphanage (and a brief, hesitant romance) before ending up on what initially seems like a pleasure-cruise to foreign parts that turns out to be anything but. The film’s often considerable power comes from Iska’s peculiarly convincing blend of streetwise cockiness and underlying innocent naïveté, which somehow remains intact right up to concluding scenes that would otherwise be the last word in bleak despair. Varga is extraordinary in the title role: it’s impossible to tell that she’s female at first, thanks to her close-cropped hair and freckled-urchin face.
The District! (Nyocker!, d. Áron Gauder, 2004) - my review DVD froze halfway through, just when the main plotline of this Hungarian feature-length animated answer to South Park and Beavis and Butt-Head was getting going. It’s a shame, as I was thoroughly enjoying it: the rotoscope-meets-CGI animation technique was new to me, and Gauder more than matches his US counterparts for unrelieved but shamelessly amusing puerility, this time enhanced with rap interludes (the highly colloquial subtitles certainly ring true). There are also hints of more intelligent social, cultural and political satire – an early classroom scene features the teenage protagonists ignoring their teacher as she struggles to get them interested in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, oblivious of the fact that their own gang rivalries and interracial romances perfectly mirror the play - but I couldn’t tell you if they’re developed to any great extent. Unsurprisingly, it’s also crammed with pop-culture references, many of which are presumably going to go way over the heads of non-Hungarian audiences, though the Matrix-style “bullet-time” shot of a mammoth falling into a pit is a genuine show-stopper – as is the entire subplot about the teens going back millions of years in time to create the conditions for oil to start flowing under their run-down Budapest suburb.
Dealer (d. Benedek Fliegauf, 2004) – for those lamenting the absence of anything by Béla Tarr in the festival, this comes closest to his worldview. On paper, this depiction of the last 24 hours in the life of an unnamed drug dealer sounds close kin to Iska’s Journey (or Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher films) as it follows him visiting his various clients (many of whom are friends or lovers), briefly acquiring a daughter along the way. Refusing to moralise, he spends much of the time trying to maintain a cool detachment from events, though the final scene makes clear that this is ultimately impossible. But realism is the last thing on Fliegauf’s mind as he shoots each scene with a slowly circling camera, only gradually revealing key details. He was also a major contributor to the soundtrack, one of the most brilliantly-designed that I’ve heard in ages. Influenced by, amongst others, the band Portishead, it’s as eloquent and rigorous as the visuals, somehow contriving to have the same faint, breathy three-note motif repeated throughout the entire running time without ever seeming redundant. Dealer certainly isn’t for everyone, and there are times when content fights a losing battle with style, but Fliegauf is definitely a talent to watch.
Posted on 25th June 2008
Under: Reviews, Hungary, György Pálfi, Krisztina Goda, Benedek Fliegauf, Csaba Bollók, Áron Gauder, Ágnes Kocsis, Nimród Antal | No Comments »
Szerelmem, Elektra
There was always something inevitable about Miklós Jancsó’s Electra My Love (a literal translation of the Hungarian Szerelmem, Elektra, though it’s also known as Elektreia). In the films from The Confrontation (Fényes szelek, 1968) to 
As with Red Psalm, the narrative plays second fiddle to everything else, so it’s worth outlining in full - this is not the kind of film where spoilers matter. At a fifteenth-anniversary commemoration of her father Agamemnon’s death, Electra (Mari Törőcsik) is told by her younger sister Chrisothemis (Gabi Jobba) to put it behind her and move on. Electra indignantly replies that she must never forget the primary reason for her opposition to the tyrant Aegisthus (József Madaras). A mere woman, she cannot raise a hand against him herself, but she lives in hope that her exiled brother Orestes will return. Aegisthus plays various psychological games with her, in an attempt to convince her that Orestes is dead, but when he turns out to be alive, his appearance inspires the people to overthrow Aegisthus. After killing Aegisthus and his supporters, Orestes and Electra die and are resurrected, free to foment revolution elsewhere.
Jancsó’s hyperstylised approach sets the protagonists against a backdrop of not only the puszta but some five hundred extras. Their intricately plotted movements run through every scene, and the big set-pieces are closer to ritual theatre than cinema. Though there’s nothing quite as formally astonishing as the massacre towards the end of Red Psalm, the film is bursting with memorable images: the line of women wending their way round a spiral path around a mount studded with candles, Orestes running through a sea of prone bodies, the usurped Aegisthus treated as a plaything by being forced to balance on a large ball (which in turn encapsulates his own shaky hold on both power and, ultimately, life), the deliberately anachronistic (and clearly symbolic) red helicopter that descends like a firebird at the end to carry Electra and Orestes off, and seemingly endless lines of horses galloping across the screen from the opening to the closing seconds. 
There are plenty of contemporary political allegories to be drawn. The frequent use of Hungarian folksong (performed onscreen) invites us to read the film as a portrait of Hungary under rulers as ruthless yet insecure as Aegisthus (apparently Gyurkó’s play was explicitly inspired by the Stalinist era. When Aegisthus proclaims a Feast of Truth, encouraging his subjects to offer direct criticism without fear of reprisal, they choose unstinting sycophancy - possibly aware that when Mao tried a similar tactic in the late 1950s, his assurances proved worthless. Aegisthus relies both on terror (his people are constantly surrounded by horsemen and whip-wielding thugs) and his subjects’ reluctance to take decisive action. However, he in turn feels powerless to discipline Electra, unless given a good excuse. When he is provided with one, such as her murder of the messenger bearing news of Orestes’ death, he takes the politically canny step of proclaiming that everyone is equal under the law, thus neatly hoisting Electra (who opens the film with a lament that without consistently-applied law, civilisation is impossible) with her own petard.
In Red Psalm, revolution is seen as a sadly necessary corrective to centuries of exploitation by the ruling classes, with any violence to be deeply regretted. By contrast, Electra herself ends up a militant revolutionary, advocating bloody revenge as a legitimate end in itself, the people justified in expressing their hatred as hatred, if their ultimate aims are the creation of a wholly equal society. It’s an uncompromisingly absolutist vision that was hard to sustain even in 1974, and subsequent events (the journey from idealism to terrorism taken by the Red Brigades in Jancsó’s adopted Italy, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia and Iraq) have shown that it’s almost invariably unsustainable when applied in practice. Which may well be why Jancsó resorted to increasingly stylised treatments in the first place: practice was already sharply deviating from theory. 
Még kér a nép
Current DVD availability makes it easy to trace Miklós Jancsó’s career from his second feature 
Reducing Red Psalm to its basic narrative outline, as I’ve just done, makes it sound like a crude piece of socialist agitprop, and its considerable musical content (its messages are as likely to be sung as declaimed) suggests affinities with the Marxist musicals of Grigori Alexandrov (Circus/Цирк, 1936) or Ivan Pyriev (Tractor Drivers/Трактористы, 1939; Cossacks of the Kuban River/Кубанские казаки, 1949). But those are altogether jollier affairs than Jancsó’s stark political parable, and far more straightforward in their construction and mise-en-scène. Once again, Jancsó is clearly fascinated by the mechanisms of power and oppression, both in theory and practice, and even when his film appears to be at its most deceptively bucolic, one can usually see evidence of a military presence in the background, and often a large-scale one.
Although Jancsó’s signature is instantly recognisable (it’s hard to imagine anyone else even trying to make a film like this, much less succeeding), there are several marked changes between Red Psalm and his 1963-67 output. He has abandoned the wide screen for the squarish Academy frame of his first films, and is now shooting in colour. While individual shots are as lengthy as ever (just twenty-eight in total, most running several minutes), their staging is different - I don’t recall him ever using a zoom lens in his black and white films, but it’s constantly in evidence here. Previously, the deep-focus shots would ensure that the surrounding landscapes remained as sharp as the people in the foreground, but here the depth of field is constantly changing: whenever Jancsó fills the frame with just one or two individuals, the background becomes blurred and foreshortened. The effect is of cutting to a close-up, albeit here within the same shot.
There are impressive individual set-pieces throughout, but perhaps most spectacular is the large-scale massacre towards the end, shot from a single camera position in the far distance, with soldiers and peasants singing and dancing together in apparent unison before the soldiers regroup into a circle around the peasants, trapping them in a human stockade (encircled by a number of men on horseback) before bringing out the rifles. There were apparently 1,500 people appearing on camera, and the choreographic logistics alone take the breath away. The unexpected background appearance of a steam locomotive pulling a train laden with hundreds of soldiers is equally startling (as no tracks have been visible up to then), but so too is the way that Jancsó will often move from distant observation to extreme close-up in the same shot, picking out details in a constantly swirling human panorama. János Kende’s ceaselessly circling camerawork, reputedly requiring more assistance than usual just to keep things in focus, is beyond praise.
Red Psalm has inescapably dated: the early 1970s may have been the last time such overtly Marxist propaganda could be presented with a straight face outside east Asia, and it’s best viewed today as a historical parable on two levels, representing both the 1890s of its setting and the still flickering spirit of 1968 that clearly animated its creation. But, like Sergei Eisenstein’s not dissimilar Strike (Стачка, 1925) - Jancsó’s associative montages are no less intricate for being staged within the same shot - Red Psalm is such a formidable work of art on its own terms that it diffuses political criticism on those grounds alone. Even by Jancsó’s standards, it’s an extraordinary film, probably his most thoroughly thought-through achievement since 
Csend és kiáltás
Both made and set in the same year as 
The opening scene, set on a sand dune, shows Kémeri - played by Zoltán Latinovits, the lead in 
Most of the film takes place in Károly’s farm on the puszta - it’s not unlike the one in the final scenes of Cantata. Károly’s wife Teréz is played by Mari Törőcsik, the iconic lead in Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta, 1955) and, shortly after this film, Károly Makk’s Love (Szerelem, 1971). Her calm demeanour conceals a deadly secret: while openly sharing István’s favours between herself and her sister-in-law Anna (Andrea Drahota), she is slowly poisoning Károly and his mother. When István finds out, he is put in a moral quandary, since it would be impossible to report them to the police without revealing his identity and whereabouts.
On the soundtrack, Jancsó’s characteristic birdsong can still be heard, but it’s often usurped by the harsher sounds of crows and cockerels, and also by a near-ubiquitous wind, which serves to chill even occasional romantic encounters to the marrow - though the word ‘romantic’ seems singularly inappropriate when applied to the scene where István is passed from Teréz to Anna, and finally neglected as the two find greater intimacy with each other. The fact that it takes place in the open air shows their essential contempt for Károly’s opinion. 
Silence and Cry was the last of Jancsó’s black-and-white Scope films, marking the end of one of the most distinctive lines drawn by anyone in 1960s cinema. His next film, The Confrontation (Fényes szelek, 1968 - only available on an unsubtitled Hungarian DVD at the time of writing) would be his first in colour, and would mark the start of a new phase in his career.
Csillagosok, katonák
Superficially, it’s easy to see why the Soviet Union thought that Miklós Jancsó would be the man to direct a Hungarian-Soviet co-production commemorating the October Revolution’s 50th anniversary. With 
In fact, The Red and the White (whose Hungarian title translates literally as ‘Starry Soldiers’, or more colloquially as ‘Stars on their Caps’) is an entirely logical follow-up to The Round-Up in that it too offers a detached, clear-eyed presentation of the mechanics of oppressive power as applied in practice. The opening scenes echo those of both The Round-Up and My Way Home in that we see large numbers of people being repeatedly rounded up, stripped and summarily executed. The impression of anarchic chaos is established from the start by a map of eastern Europe with a bewildering profusion of arrows that presumably indicate troop movements. But with no context-setting or clarification other than the suggestion that Moscow is at the heart of events, it’s as mystifying as any of the film’s later battle scenes.
We eventually encounter another distinct group besides Red and White fighters when one of the Red escapees stumbles upon a field hospital and opportunistically lying on the ground amidst a group of bodies after having spotted that not all of them are dead. Shortly afterwards, the hospital’s nurses are rounded up by the Whites - but instead of the usual and expected humiliation and slaughter, they’re whisked off to a classically Russian silver-birch wood for an impromptu recreation of a ballroom dance, complete with live musicians playing a mournful waltz. This echoes the equally surprising appearance of the military band towards the end of The Round-Up, but the effect here is even more incongruously surreal: it’s as though the Whites (i.e. the more aristocratic side of the conflict) felt a deep-seated psychological need to try to recreate a more civilised (i.e. Tsarist) past with whatever paltry materials they had at their disposal. It also marks the point where Jancsó makes it clear that anyone in search of a conventional bit of revolutionary propaganda is wasting their time - was this the point where his Soviet backers shifted uneasily in their seats, or had they written the film off already?
And then it’s back to the war, with men and horses running for their lives as they’re buzzed by planes, though as soon as they leave, it’s business as usual: more rounding-up, singling-out and summary execution. Although people are frequently shot on camera at point-blank range, there is no blood: they merely fall down as though the rifles contained compressed air. This approach was near-universal in the days of the classic John Ford westerns that Jancsó acknowledges as one of his lifelong inspirations, but by 1967 it’s become stylised enough to be just as surreal as the “ballroom” scene. If I remember rightly, just one soldier seems to display any pain when he dies in close-up towards the end, though any emotional response is limited by the fact that we have little idea who he is - it seems purely coincidental that he happened to die right in front of the camera. 
Whereas The Round-Up threaded personal stories through the long-distance overview of intricate troop movements and military operations, this time round there’s very little to latch on to. Seasoned Jancsó viewers will doubtless recognise András Kozák (the Hungarian lead in My Way Home, a key supporting player in The Round-Up) as a Red who makes regular appearances throughout the film, including a final-shot close-up - but he’s just as archetypal as his anonymous colleagues. A romance between a soldier and a nurse is perfunctory enough to suggest that Jancsó is merely tossing his audience a generic bone, one of many pieces of evidence cited by Matt Johnson, in by far the most comprehensive analysis of the film that I’ve found online, in support of his thesis that The Red and the White can be read as a great anti-war satire that rivals Dr Strangelove in its skewed adoption and subversion of traditional war-movie clichés.
Szegénylegények
It’s appropriate that Miklós Jancsó took inspiration for more than one film (
The film’s original title Szegénylegények translates as ‘the hopeless ones’ (its French title is Les Sans-espoir), and if that doesn’t already set a suitably grim and despairing tone, this is reinforced by the opening montage. Using simple illustrations and a deceptively informative voiceover (the original UK release print replaced this with a rather more detailed text scroll), Jancsó sets the scene in the late 1860s, the round-up of the English title involving the last holdouts from the 1848 Kossuth rebellion whom, one assumes, have been eking out a basic existence on the puszta ever since. But even here, images of buildings and landscapes are rapidly usurped by mechanisms of torture and oppression, made all the more unsettling for being presented as though they were items in a hardware catalogue. By the time we’re told that Count Gedeon Raday, the commissar ultimately responsible for the operation, “wasn’t particular about his methods”, that has already become abundantly clear, and one braces oneself for the worst.
Groups of horsemen thunder past either side of the camera to join their companions on the horizon, creating a startling three-dimensional effect, and throughout the film Jancsó is careful to compose for every plane - the far distance is as likely to feature people and horses in intricate geometrical arrangements as the foreground. The film often has more in common with dance than cinema: a group of hooded prisoners shuffles around in a circle, soldiers form two parallel lines to repeatedly whip a naked girl, black-clad old women bring white bundles of provisions that are laid out in a perfectly straight line. Jancsó often shoots from a high vantage point, as if to emphasise the massive scale of his canvas, and in the many sequences featuring literally hundreds of people, one can only marvel at how long they must have taken to set up. The soundtrack is clearly post-dubbed, as Jancsó liked to give directions during his long takes, aping his silent-movie forebears of four or five decades earlier.
Five years earlier, Alfred Hitchcock had taken the then virtually unprecedented decision to kill off his female lead partway through Psycho (1960). In The Round-Up Jancsó does this with such regularity that it’s impossible to latch onto any single individual, despite the presence of recognisable actors such as Zoltán Latinovits and András Kozák, the leads in his two previous films. It rapidly becomes clear that every character, without exception, is a pawn in an exceptionally complex game of three-dimensional chess whose board lacks squares and whose rules change from minute to minute.
This atmosphere of uncertainty (the film’s timescale is impossible to establish: it could be hours, weeks, months or years) means that a singled-out prisoner never knows whether he’ll end up dead or given an unexpected military promotion - and, if the latter, whether this is all part of the same macabre game and shouldn’t be taken at face value. The appearance of a full-scale military band just as a triple execution seems about to take place is both incongruously amusing and a wry comment on the ritualised nature of power: the unseen authorities seem to view the entire round-up as least in part as a gigantic Gesamtkunstwerk, a piece of conceptual art whose aesthetic impact outweighs the fact that it involves real human sacrifices.
This certainly stands up to scrutiny, but so too does a reading of the film as a representation of Bosnia, Rwanda or Iraq, which Jancsó obviously couldn’t have intended - and he clearly didn’t have September 11 in mind when staging the extraordinary sequence in which desperate prisoners fling themselves off the stockade to their deaths, or Guantánamo Bay (and Abu Ghraib) in the rigidly-defined groups of hooded prisoners who have no idea of their fate. But that’s one of the defining characteristics of a truly great work of art: it constantly reinvents itself for a new generation, and despite being over forty years old at the time of writing, Jancsó’s masterpiece has dated hardly at all.
Így jöttem