Kinoblog

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.

To say that the films of the young (b. 1974) Hungarian director György Pálfi are an acquired taste is no more than a statement of the obvious, but it’s already clear from Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006) that he’s potentially one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from European cinema in a great many years.

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 is no significant spoken dialogue at all, and subtitles are only needed right at the very end, when two thematically relevant songs are performed at a wedding. Even the central narrative strand, in which the women of the village appear to be bumping off their menfolk through poisoning (the poisons, of course, being extracted exclusively from the local flora) seems merely a part of the overall texture - though it ties in with an overriding theme about the essential uselessness of the male sex. In particular, a cut from a close-up of a pig’s swaying, grotesquely swollen testicles to a bowling ball speaks volumes in a fraction of a second.

Hukkle was disproportionately successful for a first feature, especially from an unknown Hungarian first-timer, and Pálfi duly managed to raise a substantially bigger budget for his second, Taxidermia. This time, homo sapiens is centre-stage and the dialogue is wall-to-wall (one of the first scenes has a hapless orderly reciting an insanely lengthy list of duties to his commanding officer), but the sourly dyspeptic view of humanity remains consistent. It comprises three stories, set in the 1940s, the 1960s and the present day, the protagonist of each being father to the next.

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.

The production values are matched by a more ambitious thematic approach. Each of the central characters - the WWII orderly Vendel Morosgoványi (Csaba Csene), the champion speed-eater Kálmán Balatony (Gergely Trócsányi, later Gábor Máté) and the taxidermist Lajos Balatony (Marc Bischoff) is driven by overriding obsession, whether with sex (Vendel), gluttony (Kálmán) or professional perfectionism (Lajos, who is adept enough to stuff a human embryo). All three have disastrous personal relationships: Vendel is reduced to voyeurism and fantasising (even about Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl), Kálmán’s marriage seems purely one of convenience (his wife cheats on him on their wedding day, then leaves him because she had a more lucrative offer from America), and Lajos’s only human contact other than his father and his clients seems to be with bored sales assistants in the supermarket - who have clearly written him off as a weirdo in advance, on account of the vast amount of food he purchases for the now immobile Kálmán.

Pálfi’s technical virtuosity, already well established in Hukkle, takes full advantage of the bigger budget, show-stoppers being a series of 360˚ tracking shots over a bathtub (as opposed to around it) to illustrate its multiple functions, a child’s pop-up storybook seamlessly turning into an actual set with live actors, CGI-aided vomiting and the all too physical special effects of the final sequence. They’re also better integrated into the overall conception than some of Hukkle’s conceits, which I felt occasionally betrayed a desire to show off (for instance, a Tex Avery-inspired transition where the film jumps its sprockets and the camera pulls back to reveal a bead curtain made up of film strips).

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 here. Soda can’t be blamed for some BBFC snippage (non-negotiable cuts concerning animal cruelty), and they do at least offer an anamorphic picture, but the sound is plain stereo and there are no extras. The US (Home Vision Entertainment, R1 NTSC) and Hungarian (Mokép, R2 PAL) discs are far superior - the extras are virtually identical, but the Hungarian edges ahead for its inclusion of a DTS 5.1 soundtrack. Here’s an overview:

Picture: Pretty much flawless: anamorphic, framed at 1.85:1, with virtually no visible blemishes on the print and none on the transfer. Given the director and cinematographer’s personal involvement with this release, I think it’s safe to assume it represents exactly what they wanted.

Sound: This was apparently the first Hungarian film to be mixed in 5.1 surround sound from the start, and the DVD duly serves up two surround options, in Dolby Digital and DTS. I selected the latter, and it sounded fabulous, quite literally adding a whole new dimension to a film that I’d only previously watched on VHS. Surrounds are used discreetly but fairly continuously, while the subwoofer supplies some equally subtle but very effective Lynchian rumblings, especially when underground, underwater or (paradoxically) surveying the landscape from up in the clouds. As with the picture, I can’t see how this presentation could be significantly improved upon.

Subtitles: The main feature has (and needs) virtually no subtitles, but the song lyrics at the end come across convincingly enough. All the extras also have subtitles, and while they clearly weren’t written or typeset by native English speakers (there are numerous typos and other grammatical infelicities), this is never at the expense of comprehension.

Extras: There are several extras, starting with a highly technical commentary from György Pálfi and cinematographer Gergely Pohárnok that goes into extreme detail about how they achieved particular shots (and reveals that the pig’s name was Jimmy), but offers next to no food for interpretative thought. I suspect this was entirely deliberate. Equally vague are the “making-of” documentary (more of a free-form video diary) and the other video extras, though it’s fun to see outtakes that didn’t make it into the final cut - notably a timelapse shot of a decomposing cat that could have seen service in Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts.

As for Taxidermia, it’s just been released in Britain on a disc from Tartan (Region 2 PAL) that sounds pretty bare-bones, so I’m waiting to see what the Hungarians come out with before splashing out (an unfortunate metaphor under the circumstances, but I’ll leave it in). It’s also out in France on France Télévisions (also Region 2 PAL), but only with French subtitles.

Links

• Official websites for Hukkle and Taxidermia - a distinct cut above the promotional norm, and bilingual in Hungarian and English
• IMDB entries for Hukkle and Taxidermia
• KinoEye piece on Hukkle by Andrew James Horton (18 November 2002)
• Interview with György Pálfi in The Guardian (Phil Hoad, 12 July 2007)
• Reviews of the theatrical release of Hukkle by Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Philip French (The Observer), J. Hoberman (The Village Voice), Michael Wilmington (Chicago Tribune)
• US DVD Reviews of Hukkle: Gary W Tooze (DVD Beaver - with lots of frame grabs), Glenn Erickson (DVD Savant), Jon Danziger (Digitally Obsessed), Todd Brown (DVD Talk)
• Reviews of the theatrical release of Taxidermia by Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian), Eddie Cockrell (Variety), Philip French (The Observer), Matthew Sorrento (Film Threat)
• Review of the Tartan DVD of Taxidermia by Slarek on DVD Outsider

Apologies for the lack of updates - things have been insanely busy over the past fortnight, what with the Ken Russell retrospective at BFI Southbank (for which I contributed a 75-minute illustrated talk and met the man himself a few days later) and various other work-related things - including an interview about Jan Švankmajer for MovieMail’s regular podcast series. (I finally bit the bullet and listened to it, and it’s not bad at all - I talk a little too fast, but that was partly because I only had the room in which we recorded it for a strictly limited period and was worried we might not be able to finish on time).

But I also spent the past fortnight working my way through PWA’s Anthology of Polish Animation DVDs, which were everything I could possibly have wished for. I ordered it from Merlin.pl, for what my credit card bill tells me was a whopping £11.34 including postage, and it would have been a bargain at two or three times the price. I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about the history of Polish animation to comment on the choice of specific titles, but I can certainly confirm that there wasn’t a single title amongst the 28 included that didn’t have something going for it, and there were loads of discoveries - of the animators whose work I’d never seen before, Witold Giersz and Jerzy Kucia’s films made the deepest impression on me.

Even better, presentation standards were top-notch. I suspect a lot of restoration went on behind the scenes, as picture quality was startlingly good across the board, and the transfers were pretty well flawless - the only minor quibble is that the widescreen material wasn’t anamorphically enhanced, but as the vast majority of the films were in 4:3 that wasn’t a particularly big deal. The entire package is 100% English-friendly - although hardly any of the films had any spoken content, subtitles are provided for credits, other onscreen text and even song lyrics, and the menus are also available in English. The booklet contains biographies and filmographies of all the animators, and is fully bilingual in English and Polish. (There are also French menus and subtitles).

On the Eastern European cinema front, I caught a sneak preview of this year’s surprise Palme d’Or winner, Cristian Mungiu’s devastating Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile), which more than lived up to the hype. I also saw György Pálfi’s gloriously revolting Taxidermia on the big screen for the first time (which confirmed that this film really needs an audience to react to it), and finally watched his debut Hukkle on a decent (Hungarian) DVD - I’d previously reviewed both for Sight & Sound, but had to put up with timecoded DVD and VHS screeners.

Fingers crossed I’ll have time to write in more detail on all the above - I’m stuck at home with the kids while my wife is having a four-day weekend in Prague, so this might well be what keeps me sane.