A Film a Week - In the Face of Gravity / Magasmentés

 previously published on Cineuropa

Hungary has, and has always had, a very high suicide rate. It would be too easy and unhelpful to search for the reason for that statistic in the so-called national mentality, its geography, weather or climate, although the numbers remain much the same regardless of the social and political system of the country currently in place. Part of the reason why preventive measures do not work are those systems themselves, which are not too different from one another. 

Filmmaker András Fésős proves he is well aware of that problem in his newest feature In the Face of Gravity. The film already went through national theatrical distribution at the end of last year, but it has just recently started its festival tour. After the Transylvania International FF in Cluj-Napoca, it screened in the European Film Festival Palić’s Parallels and Encounters competition. More festival bookings should ensue.

Our protagonist Sándor Félix (Romanian actor Bogdan Dumitrache, seen in Constantin Popescu’s 2010 Portrait of a Fighter as a Young Man and 2017's Pororoca) is a rescue specialist in Budapest’s central firefighters unit. On top of the physical work, he also serves as negotiator, with the reputation of being 100% able to persuade suicidal people to give up on their plan. He is dedicated to his job to the point that he follows up his “patients” later in their lives, and therefore enjoys the status of local, if not national, hero. 

However, things are not so stellar on the home front: his son Kristóf (Olivér Benjámin Börcsök) is one of the people secretly filming his department’s actions and selling the videos to a sensationalist TV station. With the wife and mother out of the picture, possibly because of Félix himself, the rift between them is wide.

These home issues soon spill onto Sándor's career. First, he becomes the victim of an elaborate prank for a popular TV show, then one of his patients, Gábor Beke (László Keszég) proves to be very persistent in his intention to kill himself due to his troublesome marriage with his wife (Andrea Takács). When a woman whose profile does not fit into the boxes of the typical suicidal person manages to surprise him, Félix’s facade crumbles completely…

Threading the fine line between the psychological drama and the genre thriller, Fésős manages to detect and address some of the issues of contemporary Hungarian society (and beyond), such as the rampant lack of compassion and the need for spectacle and sensationalism that lead to estrangement, which can result in suicide attempts. He does so primarily by creating a dense and thick atmosphere with his genre literate albeit sometimes overly expressive directing, which points viewers towards details that reveal their significance later on. There are also some subtle yet polyvalent hints to classics, such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, while the use of trademark Budapest locations, especially one of the iconic bridges, is also brilliantly executed in Péter Szatmári's and Tamás Dobos's cinematography. The neoclassical score by Gábor Keresztes successfully creates the illusion that the film is more grandiose than its budget would suggest.

The problems with In the Face of Gravity arise in the acting department. With a lead actor who nails the facial expressions but does not speak the language and thus has to be dubbed, and the rest of the cast coming mainly from the stage and being too histrionic, line deliveries become a little declamatory, influencing the general tone of the film. However, Fésős adapts to the situation, turning something that should look realistic into a subjective vision of the protagonist’s crumbling psyche, resulting in a solid, rewarding film.

A Film a Week - Cabin Pressure / Anyaság, máshogy

 previously published on Cineuropa

The definition of a family used to be quite simple and definitive: a mother and a father, who are married to each other, plus their children. Times were simpler, too, so there were fewer options on the table regarding lifestyle and the order of priorities for each individual. With more freedom of choice and individuality, there are more decisions that can be made in order to reconcile one’s wishes and reality, but it also means that certain compromises should be made.

Such a situation is portrayed in Eszter Nagy and Sára Czira’s directorial debut, Cabin Pressure, which has just premiered in the regional competition of ZagrebDox. With the unusual situation at its core and the earnest approach of the filmmakers, it could pique the interest of other festivals, especially documentary ones specialised in family and human rights topics, before it lands in its natural habitat of television.

Our protagonist is Heni, a thirty-something artist from Hungary who lives and works in Barcelona. She is quite accomplished on a professional level, but her ultimate wish is to start a family, which might be tricky given that she is focused on her career and her previous relationships did not live up to her standards. She feels she does not have enough time to try to cultivate a new relationship that could potentially bless her with a child before she turns 40. Luckily for her, contemporary medicine can offer her the services of in-vitro fertilisation, while today’s internet-based lifestyle provides an array of co-parenting schemes.

For such an endeavour, she needs a partner, and she meets him through her friends. He is a Russian gay man one generation older than her, named Andrey, who also resides in Barcelona. Although their agreement seems pretty straight-forward and devoid of any messy emotions, they still have to sail some uncharted waters, similar to those that “regular” couples have to navigate. Could their arrangement work once their son Leo is born?

Cabin Pressure is primarily the project of Eszter Nagy, and it serves as a vessel for her to put her variety of academic backgrounds (psychology, film theory and interdisciplinary arts) to good use. On the other hand, Sára Czira is a seasoned assistant director with projects such as Györgyi Pálfi’s Taxidermia and Benedek Filegauf’s Just the Wind under her belt, so her input is more than helpful here. However, it is obvious that the documentary is a first-time directorial effort for both of them, in which they have opted for a combination of a direct, intimate approach and attempts at stylistic flourishes, searching for the perfect balance in the process.

Some things work better than others. For instance, the clear sense of difference between the various locations – such as the urban, lively Barcelona, a Hungarian village where time seems to have stood still since World War II, and the cold, formal Moscow – is a joy to behold thanks to Maud-Sophie Andrieux’s assistance in the cinematography department. The editing by Anna Vaghy is also a small, unpretentious master class in adding dynamism while placing the material in a sensible order. The montage sequences, sometimes laced with Áron Filkey’s animated interventions, are an especially nice touch. On the other hand, the overuse of electronic music of different genres feels a bit over the top, while the minimal sound design makes the recorded sound seem too raw and dirty at some points. In the end, Cabin Pressure might not be perfect, but it is an interesting and honest documentary effort.

A Film a Week - Pelikan Blue / Kék Pelikan

 previously published on Cineuropa

“The smell of freedom in the air...” In an Eastern European context, that phrase clearly conjures up the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the boxed-in communist states began to open up to the West’s capitalist goods and its way of life, which also brought freedom to travel, regarded as an essential element to enable young people to get acquainted with the big, wide world beyond the borders of their state. But what can a young person dying to live life to the fullest do if financial resources are scarce?

Working from an idea by Son of Saul producer Gábor Sipos and Gábor Szentpáli, and using audio interviews from the 2010s as his basis, filmmaker and animator László Csaki has composed a unique animated documentary that could serve as one of the answers to the above question. Pelikan Blue opened the Critics’ Picks Competition at the Black Nights Film Festival and feels ready to take the film-festival world by storm.

In some fast-paced narration that we hear over the imagery, deriving from different approaches to animation and even comprising some short bursts of filmed archival material, the narrator gives us a brief background story before introducing us to the three leading characters, young men named Ákos, Petya and Laci. They wanted to travel to the West but had no money, so they had to hustle a bit. An opportunity presented itself in the guise of the lo-tech way in which Hungarian Railways dealt with their international tickets: they were all hand-written on paper, with the titular carbon paper used to make copies, and were protected only by stamps. Led by Akos’s analytical, scientific mind, the guys came up with a scheme involving imported bleach, indigo paper and copied stamps to forge the international railway tickets.

Their first trip to Scandinavia went without a hitch, so they kept on indulging in trips all over Western Europe in the early 1990s. But word of their adventures got out and, pressured by their friend Rozi, who had his own list of clients, and spurred on by Petya’s urge to help a girl he liked, their operation first became a clandestine “service” for friends, and then a large-scale and somewhat lucrative scheme that attracted the attention of both the ticket inspectors and the police.

Combining a documentary foundation, an animated approach and a certain reliance on the tenets of a fiction film, Csaki takes the best of all three worlds and combines them with ease in order to tell a magnificent, nostalgic and heart-warming story, while jumping between the two timelines – one from the 1980s and 1990s, and another from the 2010s – leaves enough space for thought and reflection. Since the fast-paced narration serves as the primary means for plot delivery, animation was pretty much the only way to go. Blending the simple 2D foundation with some figurine animation and even filmed archival material suits the purpose very well, while the animation team’s attention to period details, such as the changes in fashion and scenery in the transitional times, is simply stellar. The passing of time is further commented on through the soundtrack, which emphasises it by using different genres of popular music that emerged over the 1990s.

Stitched together masterfully by Daniel Szabó and compressed to a pleasant running time of under 80 minutes, Pelikan Blue is the type of film that leaves a permanent smile on the viewer’s face. It has the power to make us believe that, not that long ago, the world was a far better place.

A Film a Week - Power / Moc

 previously published on Cineuropa

Someone wise once said that politics is the art of the possible. In order to achieve some common goal often described as the greater good, the interested parties have to make deals and compromises using money, power, influence and services as currency in deal-making. The trouble is that there is no strict definition of the greater good and no manual on how to define it. A seemingly ordinary but actually very complex situation illustrating this conundrum stands in the centre of Mátyás Prikler’s sophomore feature Power, which premiered earlier this year at IFFR and was just shown in the Network of the Festivals in the Adriatic Region programme of the Zagreb Film Festival.

It all starts with a hunting accident in which a young local man named Adam gets killed. Since the local police and the forensics cannot trace the bullet to any of the local hunters’ rifles and the hunting party included some high-ranking politicians, it becomes a sensitive question. Steiner (Szabolcs Hajdu), a former lawyer now employed in security services, is tasked with conducting the investigation with utmost discretion. The ailing man, who only has a few months left to live, reluctantly accepts the offer from his chief (Roman Polák) in order to provide some extra resources for his family.

The investigation gets him into the orbit of several players in the ethnically mixed part of the country. There is the family of the young victim, who want justice to be served. There is the suspected shooter, minister Berger (Jan Kačer), who is the official candidate for the role of EU strategic water commissioner and whose opponent runs on the platform that would allow the privatization of the water resources — neither he nor the government can allow for such a scandal to be made public. There is also a journalist (Lucia Kašová) in search of a big break, and a high-profile political scandal might serve her cause perfectly. Finally, there is a disgraced former cop named Ondris (Mihály Kormos) who might serve as an ideal fall guy and might want to make such a deal. Each of the characters mentioned, Steiner included, has some sort of a moral compass, which makes the ideal scenario less possible.

If judged simply for its merits as a political thriller, Power is bound to fail since there is almost no mystery about the event, the actions or the motivations of the characters involved, making the ending too logical and too neat. However, the film functions way better as a drama about ethics powered by moral dilemmas and as an examination of deal- and compromise-making. 

The script, co-written by the filmmaker himself together with Marek Leščák, is ornamented by realistic details of life in a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual provincial environment and largely populated by firmly drawn characters that nevertheless leave actors plenty of room for interpretation. Actor and filmmaker Szabolcs Hajdu seizes the opportunity to play Steiner in a restrained manner with a lot of integrity, while Jan Kačer as Berger does something similar but in a slightly higher emotional register.

In terms of direction, the frequent use of one-take scenes, framed with a sense of symmetry and filmed from fixed positions and from various distances, serves the film well. The execution on the part of the cinematographer Gergely Pálos, who shoots them in wintery tones that add to the cold atmosphere, is also astute, while the piano and strings score by Zsófia Tallér highlights the seriousness of the topic and Matej Beneš’ editing keeps the structure clear and the format efficiently compact. Power might not be the most philosophical or deepest study of the titular term crucial to politics high and low, but it works well in its simplicity and clarity.

A Film a Week - Fairy Garden

 previously published on Cineuropa

The film chosen to close the documentary competition of this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival — that is, before the declaration of a national day of mourning led to rescheduling — Gergő Somogyvári’s Fairy Garden is here to remind us that all the conventions about tolerance and human rights on the global and EU level mean nothing if the particular countries have the power to override them within their national legal systems. Hungary, for example, outlawed homelessness in 2018 and banned the changing of gender on official documents after birth in 2020, fuelling an anti-homeless and anti-LGBT sentiment even more.

The heroes of Somogyvári’s film live in that kind of world. Fanni is a teenage transgender woman who was kicked out of her home by her parents for being who she is. We meet her when she is dragging her suitcase off the paved road and into the forest, where she moves in with Laci, the 60-year-old homeless man who built his shack there and is willing to share his living space with the fellow outcast, while dreaming of fixing up the place, planting a garden and repairing his old canoe to go on a trip with it.

There is a sense of understanding and even something like familial closeness between the two, but there are also differences in their characters that could be described as predominantly generational. Laci is proud to be a hard worker who likes to keep himself busy, and judges Fanni for being lazy. On the other hand, she is too stubborn to listen to his advice and not too keen on helping out with the chores in and around the house. Like most people her age, she spends a lot of time online and dreams of finding fame and love through those channels, but the reality is much harsher than she imagines. Could the duo, which eventually becomes a trio (when Laci’s friend Aranka joins the gang), survive the challenges and achieve any kind of peace, happiness and satisfaction in the future?

Somogvári, whose directorial portfolio includes several mid-length documentaries and a feature-length one, titled Trans Duna I-II (2015), opts for a strictly observational, fly-on-the-wall approach. He serves as his own cinematographer, which is actually his main trade in the documentary world (he shot last year’s Sarajevo competition title Paying a Visit to Fortuna) and helps in the process of filming, since the subjects are more willing to open up and act naturally in the presence of a smaller crew. Editor Judit Feszt stitches up the selected material in a clear way that is easy to follow, and the runtime of 83 minutes is pleasant despite some repetitiveness in showing the issues within the subjects’ relationships. Viktor Bátki’s score, largely composed of gentle guitar melodies, is used in perfect moderation to set the mood or shift it when necessary. Overall, Fairy Garden is a decently made film that calls for compassion in a society where certain people are stigmatised and left behind.

A Film a Week - Too Close

 previously published on Cineuropa

The topic of the sexual abuse of children within the confines of the family or a household is always a sensitive one, and there is probably no right way to deal with it using the form of documentary cinema. The victims are usually unwilling to open up and talk about it, as they risk further victimisation and judgement from their own milieu. This makes Botond Püsök’s Too Close an extremely risky, brave, delicate and ultimately potent portrait of the aforementioned situation. Fresh off its premiere in the documentary competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, it should secure further bookings at documentary film festivals.

The protagonist is Andrea, a theatre actress who lives in a Hungarian-speaking village somewhere in Transylvania, Romania. Her daughter Pirkó was systematically sexually abused by Andrea’s then partner Pika, and the whole story emerged while Andrea was pregnant with Pika’s son Bogyó. Confronted by Pirkó and Andrea, Pika confessed everything and was sentenced to several years in prison. However, his early release for “good behaviour” threatens to disrupt the fragile balance that Andrea and Pirkó have managed to achieve through therapy.

The reason for the panic within the home is not just Pika, but also the entire village, the locals’ behaviour towards the broken family, and their generally positive attitude towards and support for Pika. In their minds, the whole story is a lie, and in their conversations, Andrea is referred to as “The Actress”, meaning that she lies for a living, while Pika is a “salt of the earth” type, the son of the local Reformed Church priest, and the genius engineer who brought pavements and gas to the village. How could such a “good man” be a paedophile behind closed doors?

Knowing that she cannot count on the help of the local community, in which she has been assigned the status of a stranger who could never be accepted, and that any help from the official system would be flawed, insufficient and tardy, Andrea’s only hope is to sell her house and move somewhere else with the children – somewhere where all three of them could have a fresh start. In the meantime, the atmosphere in the village will become so toxic that the family will feel imprisoned in their own house and the yard around it.

The observational style with zero commentary by the filmmaker is not just a fitting and tasteful choice, but is also a testament to Andrea’s and her children’s courage in letting Püsök and his skeleton crew (the filmmaker also did the shooting himself) deep into their lives. On camera, all three of them appear completely sincere and natural, like people who have nothing to hide, regardless of Andrea’s profession, which the villagers like to disparage. Unlike the family, the locals are represented only in the form of a “gossiping chorus”, spreading their opinions and insults via voice-over narrations that are minimally processed by Támas Bonács’ sound design. This sound design and the music composed by Andor Sperling and, to a lesser extent, David Stephen Grant are used to infuse the documentary with a degree of tension that verges on the level of a thriller, and this is also thanks to the tight editing by Brigitta Bacskai, who also served as the film’s co-scriptwriter.

In the end, Too Close is equally effective as a testimony of the human nastiness that flourishes in small, enclosed communities, as a brave documentary that takes no prisoners and as a tense, pounding thriller. Its versatility makes it quite exceptional.

A Film a Week - As Far as I Know / Legjobb tudomásom szerint

 previously published on Cineuropa

The lives of a couple can be derailed in an instant by a traumatic event. Does the couple dynamic change all of a sudden, or does the trauma merely expose some underlying issues? These are the questions that duo of Hungarian filmmakers Nándor Lőrincz and Bálint Nagy deal with in their first feature, the atmospheric melange of relationship drama and slow-burning thriller As Far as I Know, which has premiered in the First Feature Competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Dénes (played by Balász Bodolai, glimpsed in László Nemes’ Sunset) and Nóra (Gabriella Hámori, whose credits include roles in genre films such as Post Mortem and The Exam) are proud members of the Budapest yuppie class. They have been a couple for a long time, working in the same marketing company and sharing the same circle of equally successful friends. Their intended adoption of a baby girl, Hana, would be the next step in their relationship.

They meet with friends to celebrate the adoption agency’s decision at a craft beer pub, but their big news is overshadowed by an announcement by another couple at the table that they are expecting their second child. Dénes and Nóra react differently to it: she does not seem concerned even a bit, while he shows some signs of having a fragile ego, and their discussion on the way home turns into a heated and loud argument on the bus. A man (Attila Menszátor Héresz) interferes and only ramps up the intensity. Nora gets off the bus at a random stop, and the man soon follows her, while Dénes stays on the bus. He arrives home first, and when Nóra also appears much later, it is clear that she is in distress: she was attacked and raped by the man from the bus.

They go to the police a few days later, which proves to be too late, evidence-wise, and the only thing the police can do is to proceed with the description of the perpetrator, hoping that he will get caught in their net. In the meantime, Dénes conducts an “investigation” of his own and tracks the man, reporting his whereabouts to the police. Once confronted, he denies it, and the police are not exactly sympathetic to Nóra. When she posts about her experience online, it attracts some attention, both wanted and unwanted, affecting everything from their careers to their chances of completing the adoption process. More importantly, the whole situation unearths deeper problems they have as a couple – mainly issues of trust and support.

Unlike the couple’s dynamic in the film, the dynamic between the directorial duo is quite smooth. They worked together previously on short films and on television, and they “cast” themselves in strict roles here. Nagy, also the movie’s cinematographer, handles the visualisation, led by the cues from Lőrincz’s script, reportedly based on true events. Working in synergy, they touch on some of the issues in the system’s inner workings (some of the visual metaphors are pure gold), but they never wander too far from the central subject or the couple’s relationship, which we see almost exclusively from Dénes’ point of view.

Both of the stars act in a pleasant, low-key emotional register, adding another layer of mystery to the central drama. The cinematography and its clear, vibrant colours stand in stark contrast with the grey area of morality and human relations that the film covers, while the piano score by Attila Fodor adds tension at just the right moments, making As Far as I Know more than just a good debut feature.