This week’s entry is Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal - and here’s what he thought.

It’s in several sections, so here are quick links:

• Introduction (by Marilyn Ferdinand)
• ‘I Laugh at Danger! Milos Forman and The Firemen’s Ball‘ (by Marilyn Ferdinand)
• ‘The Firemen’s Ball: Two Visions of Collective Action‘ (by Ed Howard)
• ‘Chaotic Bodies: The Firemen’s Ball Beauty Pageant’ (by Ed Howard) - part one/part two
• ‘Solidarity in Character‘ by Beamer

• Director: Kornél Mundruczó
• Screenplay: Kornél Mundruczó, Yvette Bíró
• Photography: Mátyás Erdély
• Editor: David Jancsó
• Costume Designer: János Breckl
• Music: Félix Lajkó
• Producer: Viktória Petrányi, Philippe Bober, Susanne Marian
• Production Company: Essential Filmproduktion GmbH, Filmpartners, Proton Cinema
• Cast: Félix Lajkó (young man), Orsi Tóth (his sister), Lili Monori (their mother), Sándor Gáspár (her lover)

By some distance the most sheerly beautiful film I saw in the 2006 Sarajevo Film Festival was the Croatian short Delta, an almost wordless study of the lives of people who live and fish by the mouth of the Danube. Kornél Mundruczó’s feature has the same title, is set in a near-identical (albeit unidentified) setting and ups the aesthetic ante yet further – in fact, if visual pleasure was the sole defining criterion of a film’s success, Delta would be hands-down one of the year’s triumphs. However, much like Mundruczó’s previous feature Johanna (2006), the film’s undeniable strengths are ultimately diluted by narrative weaknesses, with both films concluding with a final act so pat and predictable as to negate much of the power of what’s come before.

The premise could hardly be simpler. A young man returns from a long period of possibly self-imposed exile to meet his mother for the first time in what must be a good couple of decades – judging from the fact that he has an adult sister whom he’s never met. But there’s already tension in the air: the mother, possibly influenced by her suspicious boyfriend, refuses to allow him to stay with them at their place (the local watering hole, whose clientèle seems to be whiling away the long years between performing similar functions in Béla Tarr projects), and are taken aback when he not only proposes moving into his father’s hut, a derelict shack on the banks of the delta itself, but says that he’s staying for good. For much of the film’s running time he painstakingly constructs both a lengthy wooden pier and a house on stilts, growing increasingly closer to his sister in the process. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t go down well with the local populace (and neither does the young man’s flouting of local administrative requirements), and they eventually make their feelings all too clear…

But this is not, to put it mildly, a film for those in search of narrative pleasure, as much of the running time is taken up with long, wordless sequences, often accompanied solely by natural sounds. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély works miracles with light and colour – there are several shots, notably one of the delta at sunrise, the horizon a pale green brushstroke, that could have come straight out of a Turner painting. When one of the barflies dies (off camera), it seems merely an excuse for staging a breathtaking set-piece involving dozens of black-clad villagers taking to the water en masse, their boats gliding silently through the water. (It’s somewhat reminiscent of the aquatic masked parade in Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of Don Giovanni, the villagers’ faces just as fixed and expressionless). The sound similarly tends towards abstraction, consisting largely of insect chirps, frog croaks and bird calls, occasionally interspersed with lugubrious strings. The more than somewhat Herzogian feel is augmented by the use of a Popol Vuh track (‘On the Way’), and the polyrhythmic experiments of Mundruczó’s great compatriot György Ligeti are recalled in a scene where nails are banged into a timber roof strut by multiple hands (this goes on for so long that it’s entirely plausible that the nod to Ligeti’s notorious metronome piece ‘Poème Symphonique’ may well have been deliberate).

By contrast, the conversational scenes are gruffly matter-of-fact, as though Mundruczó wanted to get them over with as quickly as possible – this applies both to the encounters with the mother’s lover (where the hostility is palpable) and the ostensibly far friendlier chats between the young man and his uncle, who helps him with the construction. A rape is carried out in near-silent long-shot, so distant that it’s not immediately clear what’s going on until a close-up of the physical evidence eliminates all doubt. It’s at this point that the film starts veering towards melodrama (albeit of a slow, deep-frozen kind), finally boiling over in the penultimate scene, which might have been more effective if it hadn’t been essentially a re-run of the ending of Johanna. A coda, in which an orange lifejacket floats down the delta to the nudge-nudge accompaniment of the slow movement of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet, returns the film to its earlier contemplative mode, as though the human intervention was a mere blip in millennia of natural history.

On the evidence of this and Johanna, Mundruczó is clearly one of the more interesting of the younger generation of Hungarian directors (he was born in 1975), though he still seems a little too indebted to his sometime producer Béla Tarr (a lengthy scene of silent trudging in Delta comes across as direct homage) and he’s overfond of archetypal ‘tragic’ narratives that tend more towards predictability than profundity. These flaws seem so consistent with Mundruczó’s earlier work that it seems unlikely that they were a side-effect of extensive reshooting caused by original lead actor Lajos Bertok dying during production (the film is dedicated to him): his replacement, violinist Félix Lajkó (who also wrote the film’s original score, one of its unarguable triumphs) is more than up to the task. So too is Mundruczó’s regular female muse Orsi Tóth (she played leads in Johanna and 2002’s Pleasant Days), though the acting standout is Lili Monori as their mother, conflicted emotions scudding across her face like clouds, her face and hands conveying a lifetime of drudgery and toil.

• Director/Screenplay: Özcan Alper
• Photography: Feza Çaldiran
• Editor: Thomas Balkenhol
• Art Director: Canan Çayir
• Sound: Mohammed Mokhtari
• Music: Yuri Rydahencko, Ayşenur Kolivar, Sumru Agiryürüyen
• Producers: F. Serkan Acar
• Production Company: Kuzey Film Production
• Cast: Onur Saylak, Raife Yenigül, Megi Kobaladze, Serkan Keskin, Nino Lejava, Sibel Öz, Cihan Çamkerten, Serhan Pir, Yaşar Güven

There were two films playing in the 2008 Sarajevo Film Festival revolving around the subject of a recently released convict trying and largely failing to resume a normal life - the other was Thanos Anastopoulos’ Correction (διόρθωση, Greece, 2007). Of the two, Özcan Alper’s feature debut Autumn was the more accomplished work, not least thanks to Feza Çaldiran’s ravishing landscape photography ensuring that there was plenty to look at even when the narrative ran out of steam in the final act.

The film begins with Yusuf’s release from prison, having spent ten years behind bars for his involvement in political protests while at university. He’s released on health grounds, and we’re told at the start that his lungs are barely functioning, signalling in advance that the events of the film will merely be a brief coda to a short life, a third of which was spent incarcerated. He moves back in with his elderly mother in a remote village in the mountainous region of eastern Turkey, and rapidly discovers that aside from the young schoolboy Onur (with whom he strikes up a brief rapport over the latter’s maths homework: Yusuf was a promising mathematician before fate intervened), virtually all the local inhabitants are from his mother’s generation due to the lack of opportunities, and he’s warned that if he stays with them he’ll become like them.

But despite an apparent job offer from his friend Cihan’s magazine, Yusuf does indeed stay with them, his mindset demonstrated by him tuning out the chatter of fellow villagers awaiting a minibus to stare at a slug on the ground (he later claims that everything moves too fast for him outside prison). His old friend Mikahil lives nearby, and attempts to liven things up by taking him out for the evening with two Georgian prostitutes, Maria and Eka, but instead Yusuf ends up having a long heart-to-heart with Eka about her own life as a single mother to a four-year-old girl.

Both similarly damaged by circumstances outside their control, Yusuf and Eka seem made for each other, but the distance between them seems unbridgeable by psychological issues that he can’t put into words, and which she lacks the Turkish to express (a revealing post-lovemaking shot sees them both curled up in a foetal position, simultaneously close and distant). He tries to take up music again after restoring a set of Turkish bagpipes, but his lungs aren’t up to the job - and it’s only a seemingly ill-advised trip to the top of the mountain accompanied by a reluctant Mikahil that gives him any kind of fulfilment.

Hints of Yusuf’s experience in prison are conveyed through brief video footage (random flashbacks can be triggered by anything, even slippered feet on a carpet take on the sound of hobnails on concrete) and overheard television news items about dangerous and insanitary conditions, but Alper generally eschews direct political comment - the only details of Yusuf’s “crime” are conveyed via cryptic one-liners delivered by others: he “wanted socialism”, he “got mixed up in this anarchist business”. While inside, his father died and his sister married and moved away, meaning that Yusuf becomes the primary focus of his mother’s life, and subjected to yet more pressure to marry and settle down.

But the narrative content generally plays second fiddle to some gorgeous images, usually framing Yusuf against the flora and fauna of the village hills. Autumn is signalled by a single yellow leaf drifting past a wooden window frame, and encroaching winter by a fog-blanket settling lower and lower down the slopes. A late encounter between Yusuf and Eka becomes a study in shades of blue, a funeral sees a red coffin carried along a snow-blown mountain path, while a beach encounter at sunset sees the screen split into three strips: deep orange sky, reflected by the texture of the water, the shore in the foreground almost black.

Towards the end, Alper overdoes it somewhat - a scene where Eka complains that Yusuf is like a character from a Russian novel feels like a scriptwriter’s contrivance, and a shot of Yusuf standing on a platform looking out to sea as the waves crash around him would be overwrought even without the swelling orchestral music - though this upping of the visual melodrama is possibly in self-conscious compensation for the fact that the narrative has almost entirely fizzled out by this stage. But for a debut, it’s a very promising piece of work, and it’ll be interesting to see where Alper goes from here.

• Director: Blaž Kutin
• Screenplay: Blaž Kutin, Rolanda Rebrek
• Photography: Mitjs Ličen
• Editor: Jure Moškon
• Music: Polona Janežič
• Producer: Andrej Kregar, Rolanda Rebrek, Blaž Kutin
• Production Company: Tomahavk
• Cast: Aljoša Ternovšek (Maša), Ivan Krajnc (Grega), Peter Ternovšek (Tone), Tadej Toš (Samo)

The only world premiere in the 2008 Sarajevo Film Festival competition, Blaž Kutin’s debut feature was sadly also its biggest disappointment, a study of bereavement that offers so little dramatic meat to chew on that it barely sustains even 62 minutes. While it’s unfortunate that another Sarajevo competition film, Händl Klaus’s March/März, dealt with virtually the same theme in a far more complex and dramatically compelling fashion, Kutin’s film would struggle to make an impression even without that drawback.

The narrative premise sees middle-aged Tone visiting his son Grega and daughter-in-law Maša for 24 hours prior to what, judging from Tone’s black suit, seems likely to be a funeral. The tone and content of the entire film is encapsulated in the two opening shots: the first is a long sequence, shot through a car windscreen, of Tone driving to the couple’s home in Ljubljana, the natural sound of the falling rain broken by Polona Janežič’s simple, repetitive piano theme, which will make regular reappearances thereafter. The second shows Grega and Maša sitting expressionless on the futon - they wait for the third ring before admitting Tone, giving us plenty of time to scan the composition for situational clues: the broken clock on the floor, the small collection of children’s toys, the way the couple do anything but look at each other.

The rest of the film spans the time that Tone spends with the couple: although he initially attempts small talk (his first conversation is about their teeth, his apparently expert knowledge suggesting that he’s a dentist or hygienist), and suggests driving them to various places, it’s very clear very early that Grega and Maša are in no mood for conversation, so he stands back and lets them deal with their private traumas in whatever way they deem appropriate.

Much of the time, Kutin’s camera stares fixedly at Grega and Maša as they distract themselves by throwing stones (initially at offscreen metal objects, then, more alarmingly, at Tone as he swims), playing children’s ‘I Spy’ games, randomly assaulting tethered bicycles (presumably, this is a sign of the circumstances of their own child’s death), verbal and physical bickering, pushing each other away and then desperately embracing, all the while fantasising about travel plans - they clearly want to escape their present existence, but have no idea where to go.

About three-quarters of the way through, a fourth character is introduced when Grega impulsively pays a midnight visit to Samo, an old college friend, whom he clearly hasn’t seen for years, since he’s unaware of the couple’s present situation and tactlessly opines that Grega would be a great dad. Despite extensive travelling, Samo lets slip that he’s never been to Venice (only just over the Italian border), which inspires Grega and Maša to go there - but the combination of water and tolling bells proves emotionally overwhelming, or at least to them.

Although individual sequences can be very effective (the Venice scenes aside, there’s a tentative mid-point reconciliation in a forest, with the sun breaking through the rain - Mitjs Ličen’s cinematography is so beautiful here that the effect is nowhere near as clichéd in practice as it sounds in theory), the film ultimately has as little to say as Grega and Maša themselves. Because we’re given next to no context (Tone, the viewer’s onscreen surrogate, is presumably privy to far more information, but reveals little aside from a brief mobile phone conversation, presumably with his wife), it’s difficult to generate much empathy, especially when Grega’s behaviour towards Maša veers uncomfortably close to physical and psychological abuse.

The film’s central thesis, that the recently bereaved will often behave irrationally and impulsively, is scarcely a novel observation (and one that in any case is explored more imaginatively in March), and Kutin’s visual approach, whereby his camera stares fixedly at the couple in a series of long, static takes (the camera only moves when tracking a moving vehicle), creates an overall effect of voyeuristic eavesdropping on private grief. The net result is that we ultimately feel as uncomfortable as Tone - more so, in fact, since we have no reason for being there.

• Director: Dejan Zečević
• Screenplay: Dejan Zečević, Boban Jevtić
• Photography: Goran Volarević
• Editor: Marko Glušac
• Music: Nemanja Mosurović, Slobodan Negić
• Producers: Željko Mitrović, Slobodan Jocić, Dénes Szekeres, Nikolina Vučetić
• Production Company: Viktorija film
• Cast: Nikola Kojo, Bogdan Diklić, Dragan Petrović, Marija Karan, Boris Milivojević, Dragan Nikolić, Radoslav Milenković, Semka Sokolović Bertok, Feđa Stojanović, Miloš Timotijević, Miki Krstović, Dijana Marojević

A slickly efficient thriller with enough distinctive regional colour to compensate for the umpteenth revival of the hoary old amnesiac-delving-into-his-past device, The Fourth Man (not to be confused with the 1983 Paul Verhoeven opus De vierde man) maintains a pleasing amount of tension throughout, and is certainly one of the most straightforwardly enjoyable films I’ve seen at the Sarajevo Film Festival so far. Unfortunately, at least for reviewing purposes, it’s also the kind of film where the less one knows in advance, the better (and its pleasures are almost entirely narrative-based) – but I’ll try to make this as spoiler-free as possible.

It’s certainly not giving away anything important to reveal that when Lazar Stanković wakes up in hospital from a two-month coma with a hole in his head and severe memory loss, he was targeted by unknown assassins (who also killed his wife Sonja and teenage son Miloš) in connection with his government-sponsored activities, though quite what those activities involved only becomes clear as the film progresses – let’s just say that his collection of army uniforms and weaponry and an instinctive gift for self-preservation didn’t come about from civil service pen-pushing.

While still in hospital, he’s visited by two people – the colonel of his former unit (Lazar was a major), and a detective from the Military Security Agency investigating the assassination attempt. Lazar is instinctively suspicious of both of them (“Supposing you’re lying?”, he asks one, only to get the response “Supposing I’m not?”) - and also prone to brief flashes from his past, though they don’t trouble his retina long enough to leave a truly indelible impression. It also seems that he has a mistress, Teodora, and habitually drinks Jack Daniel’s, both details coming as news to him.

One of these people then spends much of the rest of the film exploiting both Lazar’s ability to kill ruthlessly without compunction and his inability to remember his past. The title refers to the fourth intended victim of three targeted killings, the others being a businessman, a mafioso and a politician. Their various jobs fuse with the revelations about precisely what Lazar did for the Serb government, allowing director Dejan Zečević to construct a cynical thesis about the absolute corruptibility of ‘respectable’ Serbian society, and the government’s ultimate responsibility for various atrocities.

Lazar constantly plays a game of cat-and-mouse both with his various interlocutors and mysterious third parties, including a man who always seems to be eavesdropping on his conversations or tailing him in his car or on the Belgrade metro. The city seems permanently drenched in rain, its grey skies matched by equally drab exteriors (someone has graffitied ‘ALCATRAZ’ on the side of Lazar’s apartment building). Lazar’s three targets all deny any knowledge of him, though the spectacular unpleasantness of the first two (the businessman threatens him with a “you want to sip your own balls through a straw in a glass?”, while the mafioso’s response to being shown a picture of Lazar’s dead family is to roll it up and snort cocaine through it) gives him more than enough excuse to go through with his assignment.

However, much like a British old-school gangster from the era of the Kray twins, Lazar has real problems shooting women and children. He lets one female witness go, and it’s left to someone else to nobble her prior to her taking part in an identity parade, while a blackly comic scene involving the politician’s young son asking Lazar to refill his waterpistol provides a moment of splendidly Hitchcockian tension as the two men were trying to kill each other at the time. The politician turns out to be the most eloquent of Lazar’s intended victims, turning the conversation to religion and metaphysics before claiming that once one gets to know the human soul, one stops believing in it. Given what we eventually discover about Lazar’s past, it’s easy to see why one might feel that way.

And it’s here that it becomes clear that the film’s amnesia subplot offers more than merely a further variation on a long-established theme (Christopher Nolan’s Memento is probably the best recent example in the last decade). The atrocities of the various Balkan wars of the 1990s – and Lazar is reminded that he saw service in Croatia, Bosnia and indeed Rwanda – have understandably triggered a collective memory loss, with few willing to admit their culpability: not since the Nuremberg trials have so many people claimed to be merely obeying orders, even if those orders compelled them to shoot lines of unarmed Bosnian civilians in the head. Lazar’s great advantage to his puppetmaster is that he doesn’t know enough about the situation to challenge what he’s doing and even thinks that his various missions might help clarify matters – it’s only when he finally recalls the full horror of what happened to his family that he realises that he’s been a pawn in the most literal sense of the term.

Individual set-pieces are expertly handled, from the initial stalking, the evasion of security systems, the hit itself, and the equally important clean-up (with Lazar leaving an empty shell-case as a signature), and the revelatory flashbacks become increasingly explicit without ever quite giving away crucial details until Zečević is ready to do so. Though every scene forms an utterly logical part of the whole (the plot has been so carefully assembled that one can almost hear the ‘click’ as each element slides smoothly into place), it’s rarely predictable, largely because we’re never given any more information than Lazar, and have to share his bewilderment. Zečević keeps the plot twists and surprise revelations coming thick and fast, right up to the very last scene – a denouement so cynical in its implications that it made many in the audience laugh out loud. For all the darkness at its heart, the film is enormously entertaining: Zečević, like Lazar’s manipulator, is clearly thoroughly enjoying himself, and it’s easy enough to succumb to his blandishments.

I don’t know whether the graffiti predated Karadžić’s capture, but few attending the festival are likely to forget Srebrenica, as it looms large in both the programme and even the titles of such films as Haris Prolić’s Srebrenica Cenotaph, constructed from (literally) unearthed camcorder footage of Srebrenica residents as they eked out an uncertain existence between 1992-4. The massacre also unavoidably dominated Adnan Ćuhara’s The Seeker (Tragač), an hour-long portrait of Amor Mašović, the director of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Missing Persons Institute, who has spent fifteen years examining the evidence revealed by mass graves. Both will be reviewed at greater length later this week.

• Director: Branko Đurić
• Screenplay: Branko Đurić, Feri Lainšček, Miroslav Mandič
• Photography: Sven Pepeonik
• Editor: Miran Miošić
• Music: Nedim Babović
• Producers: Janez Jauh, Ademir Kenović
• Production Companies: ATA Produkcija, Refresh Production, Gustav film, Jadran Film, RTV Slovenia
• Cast: Tanja Ribič, Branko Đurić, Jaka Fon, Semka Sokolović Bertok

Boasting not just the most self-parodically ‘Eastern European’ title of anything playing in the 2008 Sarajevo Film Festival but also arguably this entire blog, director/co-writer/star Branko Đurić’s film is an extremely broad comedy set entirely in a backward Slovenian peasant community in – apparently – the late 1960s. Not that the era is especially clear from anything onscreen, as they still plough their fields manually, rely on the local gypsy band for all things musical, and consult the local fortune-teller for advice on how to deal with everything from unwanted pregnancies to troublesome rivals.

She’s also the steely no-nonsense mother of Stefan Breza Popov (Đurić) a forty-year-old who’s apparently spent his entire adult life keeping her farm ticking over, despite harbouring implausible dreams of becoming a rock star. To this end, Breza has cultivated a Beatles mop-top (kept suitably wavy by a home-made combination of used corncobs and cow saliva) and George Harrison moustache, dresses in brown jacket, flared trousers and tartan winkle-pickers, and has purchased an electric guitar, with which he intends to wow the village and win the woman of his dreams – red-headed Silvija (Tania Ribič), a Swiss émigrée who works in the local restaurant. Despite his performance (rehearsed in the barn at great length to a recording of an unnamed “English rocker”, and using a chicken’s freshly plucked tailfeather as a plectrum) being hilariously terrible – the lyrics consisting almost entirely of “Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby, rock’n’roll!” - it is at least livelier than the usual gypsy offering and achieves the desired effect.

But Silvija has a complicated love life, sleeping on a regular basis with gypsy band member Gjirkoš, who despite refusing to leave his wife to marry her, nonetheless insists on a kind of droit de seigneur whenever he’s in the mood and she’s on her own (“Find a dummy, marry him, screw him when you have to and me when you want to” - though Gjirkoš doesn’t seem too bothered about that final clause as the film progresses). And Breza, too, is in something of a pickle, having pledged his mother’s cow Cvetka’s calf to the gypsies as a bribe to let him perform, the fact that Cvetka neither has a calf nor is pregnant being a minor obstacle. To complicate matters further, his mother has just taken on a new farmhand in the form of deaf-mute dwarf Duplin (Jaka Fon), who while well-meaning nonetheless has a habit of being in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time.

As that very brief cherry-pick of events from the film’s first third suggests, this is not a film for those who prize refined verbal and conceptual wit over pratfalls and slapstick. There are many times when Tractor, Love and Rock’n’Roll resembles a particularly silly Alexei Sayle sketch that’s been stretched out to feature length, and stereotypes run rampant throughout (“He beat your wife? But we gypsies only beat our own wives!”). That it somehow manages to run the distance is largely due to the likeable cast, especially leads Đurić and Ribič (the latter even managing to infuse the proceedings with several genuine dollops of pathos, whether bewailing her unsuccessful career and love life or agonising over the fact that her baby’s father isn’t her new husband), and a cheerful determination to wring laughs out of anything that moves, including chickens, pigs, goats, cows, and even an owl, which quizzically stares at Breza following an argument with Gjirkoš’s wife.

As is so often the case in films like this, the women generally come off best, with Silvija and her blonde colleague Nada running rings round the hapless Breza when he comes courting, though it’s Breza’s indomitable mother who rules the roost – even after he’s caught red-handed performing a little calf-rustling, she browbeats the gang that’s about to mete out a well-deserved punishment till they let him go. She can, as Basil Fawlty once observed of his own wife, kill a man at ten feet with one blow of her tongue – or at least close off any possibility for future discussion. “You gave my guitar to the gypsies!”, wails Breza after another bout of Machiavellian underhandedness on her part. “They have electricity now”, she replies, as though that justified everything.

Behind the camera, Đurić is efficient rather than inspired, though there’s a nifty trompe-l’œil shot at the start when we see what appears to be a large wardrobe being carried through a field of yellow rape – until the camera descends to ground level and it turns out to be a small wooden box being carried by Duplin on his head. This shot is echoed in the final pull-back from the farm, in which we see that Silvija’s plan to replace its traditional output by growing gladioli has been more than achieved. Narratively, it’s somewhat episodic, with many running gags (Duplin’s mysterious dried black fruit, Breza enlarging the farmhouse windows after his future father-in-law complains that they’re too small) fizzling out rather than building to a punchline, and Breza’s ultimate fate seems more than a little undeserved, though no-one seems that concerned by what would appear to be a blatant miscarriage of justice. After all, he probably deserved it merely for importing ‘rock’a’ro’ into the village in the first place.

• Director/Screenplay: Anna Faur
• Photography: András Gondár
• Editor: Vanda Arányi
• Music: Márton Hegedűs, Ádám Jávorka
• Producer: Pál Sándor
• Production Company: Hunnia Filmstúdió
• Cast: Fulvia Collongues (Dina), Hélène François (Anita), Sándor Zsótér (Ernő), Roland Rába (Béla), Kornél Mundruczó (Péter), Andrea Fullajtár (Rita), Bori Péterfy (Ildikó), Támas Polgár (Zsolti), Kata Rónai (Ernő’s daughter), Tibor Karajos (Béla’s son), Alexa Szabó (Béla’s daughter), Panni Faur (Injured woman), Bertalan Sugár (Passenger)

The opening titles of Anna Faur’s disturbing feature debut begin with what looks like a standard disclaimer about the events and people depicted in the film being imaginary – presumably a Hungarian audience would have picked up on the fact that she sourced her material from a true story that hit the headlines in 1997, when a taxi driver was murdered for no apparent reason by two teenage girls.

The murder in question forms the film’s final act, though the film has hardly been a thriller up to then – it’s much closer to a Hungarian equivalent of Larry Clark’s vividly-staged but almost unwatchably bleak Kids (US, 1995). The kids here (the average age seems to be fourteen) lead lives that are just as empty and pointless: a particularly hideous teenage party features two boys openly masturbating on the sofa to hard-core pornography while girls are groped and fingered in dark corners or bathrooms. Sex has become entirely commodified – there’s not even the faintest sense that it has any emotional function, and the adults are just as culpable as the teens, only without the excuse of ignorance.

The girls of the title are Dini (Fulvia Collongues) and Anita (Hélène François), who spend their time truanting, hanging around shopping centres and fairgrounds, and offering sexual favours to taxi drivers, either for money or in exchange for driving lessons. Dini is by some distance the film’s most horribly convincing character, ruthlessly exploiting every opportunity that comes her way (she makes it clear to her occasional lover Anita that she feels nothing for Zsolti (Tamás Polgár), the boy she’s hitting on – she seems more interested in the possibilities offered by a weekend in his rich parents’ house). Anita does at least have a mother, but there’s no sign of any authority in Dini’s life, and she seems to have no moral compass whatsoever – although she’s constantly accusing Anita of embarrassing her, she scarcely seems to understand the meaning of the word, with her casual alfresco public urination, feeding a stray dog by chewing and spitting out gobbets of sandwich, and casual handbag theft (followed by the wholesale destruction of its contents, including sentimental postcards, once it fails to yield the desired riches). That said, she does hint at a tiny degree of shame when she visibly bridles at being called a whore, the wealth of supporting evidence notwithstanding. Collongues’ fiercely charismatic performance - Dini is not, to put it mildly, the kind of person you want to get in an argument with - is the strongest in the film by some margin, completely belying her lack of experience.

The more fastidious Anita is largely in Dini’s shadow – she’s happy to go along with her friend’s exploits but draws the line at participation unless it’s unavoidable (and for instance, clubbing Dini’s client on the back of the head while he’s otherwise distracted). Unlike Dini, she does seem genuinely hurt by emotional slights, especially when Zsolti callously (and mendaciously? Who knows?) tells her that he and Dini don’t ever mention her when they’re together. She lives with her mother in a small flat full of tacky tourist souvenirs, which she finds both repellent and compelling – at least in providing her with the ambition to flee at all costs (the lyrics of the soundtrack songs are frequently about the joys of escape).

The film’s other protagonist is Ernő (Sándor Zsótér), one of the taxi drivers, who seeks regular sexual relief from Dini as an all too temporary escape from a completely loveless marriage – and a couple of scenes suggest that if it wasn’t for Dini’s ready availability, he’d be pressing his attentions onto his young daughter. His wife Rita openly despises him, blaming his constant (if fruitless) quests for a fast buck (which largely revolve around insurance fraud – his deliberately engineered crashes are an adult equivalent of Dini and Anita’s dodgem-car rides) as the reason she hasn’t been able to afford treatment for her acne-pitted face, though her chainsmoking can’t have helped. She says she’s only staying in the marriage for the sake of their daughter, but her despairing view of their future is summed up by her wish that she’d will end up fat so that boys won’t find her attractive. She’s close friends with Ildikó, who is married to Ernő’s colleague Béla, his usual partner in crime, and their children often play together, with cries of “stupid cocksucking faggot!” occasionally audible from their bedrooms. (”Touch them again and I’ll break your arm”, says Béla to his son Tibi when he catches him fighting with Ernő’s daughter).

Faur’s approach is generally ultra-realistic, with many characters shown in calculatedly unflattering close-up. Occasionally, though, she and cinematographer András Gondár strive for something more poeticised, such as a mid-point scene in which the camera tracks Anita as she walks past a long stretch of waste ground, or the scene where Dini and Anita achieve a tentative reconciliation while balancing precariously on large silver pipes. The film’s final act, in which an attempted robbery turns into a full-blown murder (though the identity of the victim isn’t what one might have expected from the foregoing), recalls the equivalent scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (US, 1966) or, more pertinently given the victim’s occupation, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu, Poland, 1987), in that it’s agonisingly drawn-out, the girls’ expected scenario whereby he conveniently crumples at the first blow of a Coke bottle to the back of the head, proving as misguided and poorly thought-through as all their other plans.

But though Dini and Anita’s culpability is never in doubt, Faur never points an accusing finger directly at them – she clearly regards the ghastliness of their background and the nonexistent opportunities for advancement as being just as responsible for their actions. Regardless of their immediate financial or family situation, all the film’s characters are scraping an existence on the very margins of society. She acknowledges the influence of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (whose 2005 film L’Enfant also showed how the need for survival will always trump morality) and her compatriot Kornél Mundruczó (who plays a supporting role here), though the fact that she’s presenting not merely a female point of view but an alarmingly unvarnished one means that Girls has its own considerable value – even if it’s not a film most people will want to watch more than once.

The other colour that’s hard to miss when entering Sarajevo from the airport is the hideous yellow of the Holiday Inn, famous for its background appearance in numerous news items about the 1992-5 Bosnian war. I stayed there two years ago, and despite the exterior it was perfectly fine as a hotel - though my most vivid memory was from the opening night, when I returned from the party to find a note had been pushed under my door reading “Your mother has just died - our condolences.”

Fortunately, it took me about half a millisecond to realise that it referred to my grandmother (and it wasn’t a surprise: in fact, I’d been expecting a call along those lines), and I later found out from my wife that the staff were very reluctant about communicating this in a note and that she had to talk them into it. (She didn’t know, of course, about the fundamental misunderstanding). Still, there was no harm done, and I still have the note - I took it to the funeral, where it provided a certain blackly comic frisson.