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 »
Ucieczka z kina ‘Wolność’
Premiered on 15 October 1990, just over a year after the election of Poland’s first non-communist government in over four decades, Wojciech Marczewski’s Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema offers a bizarre but rather engaging combination of anti-communist satire and film-versus-reality metaphysical trickery in the manner of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924) or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). 
Unable to come up with a plausible explanation for this, but legally incapable of shutting down a film that’s been officially passed as suitable for screening (Marczewski has a lot of fun mocking bureaucratic red tape), Rabkiewicz concocts an elaborate plan that will involve keeping the cinema open but empty, subsidising the management for its losses. (This part seems to satirise the common Eastern bloc practice whereby troublesome films would get given a deliberately limited release, usually out in the sticks well away from the equally troublesome target audience). But this is expensive, so Rabkiewicz’s superiors pay him and the cinema a visit to assess the situation. They also bring along a film critic to judge the merit of what’s on screen - which by then has turned into an endless whingefest as the more activist actors are challenged by those who just want to finish the job and go home.
There’s a particularly delightful running gag in which people burst into snatches of Mozart (not opera, as some commentators have claimed, but the Requiem - which seems more appropriately symbolic), seemingly just for the hell of it, anticipating the flash-mob phenomenon by nearly two decades. There’s also a more sombre scene, set on a rooftop, in which Rabkiewicz (who has found a way of entering ‘Daybreak’ in order to escape his colleagues) is confronted by actors whose careers were ruined by his often arbitrary decisions to censor their work - and it’s at moments like these that Marczewski can’t help but betray his anger at a system that stifled so much talent, often out of entirely misplaced paranoia. 
Ludzie z pustego obszaru
The film begins with a series of shots taken around Warsaw’s Praga district. A moving camera (there’s no attempt to disguise that it’s shooting from a car, and no need: this is exactly what passing drivers would see) observes various groups of young men hanging out in small groups. The commentary says it’s easy to single them out, as they have a certain posture, the same bored, expressionless faces - yet there’s nothing especially menacing about them either. The narrator is as intrigued as we are: who are these people, and why do they spend most of their time on the street?
Just past the halfway mark Karabasz and Ślesicki start asking the expected sociological questions: did they leave their parents too early, did they have bad experiences at school (repeating a year, for instance), or did they simply pick the wrong job, souring their views on work as a whole? It’s clear that part of their disillusionment with the world stems from their realisation that all they’d been told about the value of school and work was a pack of lies: they learned little and got less stimulation, and didn’t even notice the supposedly pivotal transition to adulthood. They dream of escape, but rarely do anything about it except go to the cinema for the temporary variety. The only time they show signs of life is during a wild rock’n'roll-fuelled party, heavily lubricated by alcohol (”They want to kill the boredom and emptiness in one go”) - but this, of course, is the thing that ’society’ objects to, as a montage of scandalised headlines reveals. 
The film is included on PWA’s 
Lubelska starówka
But although his message is broadly similar, Kosiński eschews lyricism or sensationalism in favour of full-on sarcasm. Over shots of children playing in a courtyard that doubles as a rubbish tip, we’re told about the level of care taken “to preserve the authentic character of these historical spots”. A perilous crack in a wooden balcony is “an original fracture from the times of Biernat of Lublin”, while a rickety ladder missing half its steps “has an invigorating effect, contrasting with boring and conventional stairwells”. And it continues in a similar vein - crumbling walls of near-derelict buildings are “our own counterpart of the Forum Romanum”, a visibly rotting water pipe has a “medieval ascetic ambience, facilitating the renunciation of the illusion of worldly comforts”, while wooden pillers blatantly and somewhat desperately propping up the ceilings are “stylish ornaments”.
Throughout, we hear the sound of a solo trumpet. As in 
Warszawa 1956
This change in tone is accompanied by an even more dramatic shift in visual content - we’re now looking behind the façades, at people who live in multi-storey apartments that are still visibly bombed-out, with vertiginous plunges awaiting anyone who missteps - we soon see an example of a boy with his leg in plaster who ran out of his room straight over the precipice (and, as Łapicki adds, somewhat callously, has only himself to blame). Clutching onto rickety railings, children look up at holes that run through several floors, still tracing the trajectory of bombs dropped a dozen years before - in one neatly macabre touch that foreshadows what’s to come, a small boy tosses a paper plane into one of these artificial shafts.
Just after the halfway mark, the film shifts into its second act, and the one that gives it its reputation as a miniature masterpiece of suspense to rival anything in Hitchcock and Clouzot’s catalogues. As the father of two young children myself, I have to admit that this sequence is perilously close to being unwatchable - and that’s not remotely a criticism of directors Jerzy Bossak and Jarosław Brzozowski, who clearly intended precisely this reaction. Up to this point, the soundtrack has been entirely non-diegetic, consisting entirely of deceptively jaunty accordion music and Łapicki’s narration. Now, direct sound takes over, a carefully-calibrated parade of creaks and groans that emphasise the building’s appalling fragility - accompanied by the hesitant footsteps of a toddler who has managed to break free, dragging the string that tied him to the bed behind him like a perverse variation on Ariadne’s thread. Bossak and Brzozowski use every suspense tactic at their disposal, and when the toddler spots a pigeon and starts to chase after it, many viewers will be watching through their fingers. 
Miasteczko
Wincentowo used to be a specialist shoe-making town, with centuries-old legends about catering for the feet of King Stanislaus Augustus in the sixteenth century. But it’s not a business to be in during times of economic hardship, as raw materials are expensive. As the film demonstrates, the deceptively thriving market is essentially a front for the black market in leather - a risky trade, since the penalties for getting caught are severe, and uniformed inspectors prowl the stalls. A man is caught and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a hefty fine, and his weeping wife leaves the court on her own, to break the news to her two children. 
As with the early films of Kazimierz Karabasz and Władysław Ślesicki (
Skalna ziemia
But some of the inhabitants are eventually persuaded to venture through the doors of the nearby Kamienica medical centre, whose white walls must have looked unnervingly pristine to their eyes. While their attendance shows that the first stage of their distrust has been conquered, the doctor still faces challenges to his authority: one patient refuses to take medicine because the local healer has said it will do him no good. (”Obviously, the healer is always wider than a doctor”, the latter acknowledges ruefully). Vocabulary is a problem, as the locals are vague or evasive about their specific ailments, so time-consuming top-to-toe medical check-ups become the norm. During these, the doctor sometimes finds evidence of less expert “treatment” - an elderly man covered up a carbuncle with resin, causing a major infection. Warned that this sort of thing might kill him, he interprets it as a threat, and flees (through a cemetery studded with large wooden crosses). 
The doctor’s commentary becomes increasingly weary at this point, bemoaning the sheer scale of his task, and how nothing in his training prepared himself for these situations. But on the way home, he meets Kasia, a young girl who initially had to be forced into hospital with the aid of the militia, but who is now in the peak of health. It’s a small but potent victory - as he puts it, “how little is necessary for a man to regain self-esteem: one smile of a child is enough for a whole day”. Compared with the bleak despair that suffuses most of the other ‘black series’ documentaries, it’s a surprisingly upbeat conclusion - as well as an implicit rebuke to those in authority who think that drastic changes can be implemented overnight.
Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc
Amateur dramatics rehearsals are conducted in the same space as table tennis games and even pigeon fancying, not to mention meetings of the social committee to allocate who does what when - and as they deliberate, the original drawings appear on screen to show what they were promised. The “cultural revolution” in Targówek amounts to a travelling cinema that visits once a month. “Who is responsible for this?” asks the commentary, and is given no answer, as hooligans similar to the ones in Hoffman and Skórzewski’s film menace a young woman in the dimly-lit night-time streets. 
In terms of the film’s underlying message, Karabasz and Ślesicki eschew direct finger-pointing - “we” are apparently to blame for deceiving the people of Targówek, not any specific planning body. If one hadn’t been told, one would never have guessed that this film was shot in Warsaw: the wooden shacks and mudbath roads seem to come from somewhere much more rural. If contemporary reactions are any guide, the message got through: the film’s initial audiences and critics were genuinely shocked to be exposed to the reality behind years of utopian rhetoric of a kind that undoubtedly accompanied the original announcement about Targówek’s House of Culture.
Pokolenie
It’s easy to overrate A Generation. Always one of the most straightforward of Andrzej Wajda’s films to get hold of, thanks largely to its regular bundling with the far more accomplished Kanal (Kanał, 1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament, 1958) as an artificial “war trilogy” (which could just as easily have commenced with Kanal and ended with his fourth feature Lotna, which also has a World War II setting), it’s garnered a formidable reputation as the fount from which postwar Polish cinema sprang. While it was certainly a groundbreaking film, and its historical significance is impossible to ignore or deny, it’s ultimately a lesser entry in Wajda’s canon, a film of considerable promise rather than a fully achieved masterwork. 
Adapted by Bohdan Czeszko from his own novel, A Generation begins as though it’s going to develop into a light-hearted adventure, a teenage Boy’s Own romp as our plucky heroes run rings around the flat-footed Nazis. This initial impression is quickly undermined when Stach and his friends Kostek and Zysio board a German train with the intention of stealing its coal (or giving it back to the Polish people: “we were patriotic thieves”), a prank that leaves Zysio shot dead by a guard, Kostek missing, and Stach hiding out in an abandoned brickworks. (A shot of Kostek running to catch a moving train is somewhat unnerving in retrospect - because he’s played by Zbigniew Cybulski, who would die in real life in near-identical circumstances just over a decade later).
Though the film seems to be based around the growing closeness between Stach and Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska), his resistance co-ordinator, in many ways the subplot revolving around Stach’s colleague Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar) leaves a stronger impression. While Stach is happy to do whatever the war effort takes (and not just because of his clear attraction Dorota), Jasio is far more hesitant, claiming repeatedly that as a civilian he should be above such things. But after being taunted as a coward, he’s the first to actually kill a German, although the fact that this assassination wasn’t sanctioned by Dorota serves to alienate him further from their group - which also includes Jacek (Ryszard Kotas) and Mundek (Roman Polański).
Wajda’s early training as a painter is put to good use in a series of striking images and concepts, many motifs weaving themselves throughout the narrative. The glistening, swivelling eyes of the figure adorning the bar-owner Aunt Valerie’s clock will later be echoed by Jasio’s hunted expression as he contemplates his first killing. Similarly, a line of hanged men arranged as a warning to others is mimicked by the dangling fish-shaped sign overhead as Jasio runs for his life. Wajda’s eye for distinctive faces is already much in evidence: just look at the scene in which Ziarno and his unnamed fellow agent confront a mob of hostile neighbours for a small masterclass in how to convey maximum information with minimal dialogue.
Dzieci oskarżają
After such a despairingly gloom-drenched opening, it’s hard to watch the successive montages of happy, smiling, laughing and playing children without worrying (usually justifiably) about what’s about to happen. A new baby is born, and the proud parents and their delighted friends and relatives celebrate - which naturally involves drinking alcohol. What’s wrong with that? Absolutely nothing at this stage, but when the child reaches the age of seven, his father compels him to join in and swig a shot of vodka. As he does so, the camera scrutinises his face in close-up, as it registers both his distaste and his tearful realisation of what it’s doing to his parents. 
Finally, we hear a child’s first-hand account as he narrates the experience of living with two alcoholic parents in a slum that barely passes for human habitation, having to rear his four younger siblings almost single-handed. As he goes out to buy vodka, there’s a return to the shop-window motif of the opening scene, only this time there’s no loving mother to indulge her child’s desires. Though they themselves don’t necessarily indulge, his siblings and countless other children like them have been irreparably damaged by their parents’ alcoholism - and the most disturbing montage is left until the end, as we see (presumably genuine) footage of severely traumatised children, the horrors of whose lives don’t bear thinking about.