Erzsébet Bori
The Dolls of Yesteryear
Péter Tímár: Csinibaba (Dollybirds) * Attila Janisch: Hosszú alkony (Long Dusk) * János Szász: A Witman fiúk (The Witman Brothers)
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“A sixties music and dance reverie,” promises the film’s secondary title, and Tímár cunningly sees to it that there is room for this too in his double edged film. If you really want to, you can believe that Dollybirds is about the sixties. The many young viewers who have only heard about the period from their elders - the myth making “great” generation - can take it for granted that this is what life was like in Hungary in 1962. Longer and longer hair, shorter and shorter skirts, boys with their guitars getting ready for the Helsinki World Youth Festival, anti-government demonstrations at showings of La Dolce Vita in the cinema, Bambi (a synthetic orange juice) sipped through a straw. Fairy stories.
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Dollybirds’ appreciative audience doesn’t want to acknowledge the irony the film uses in treating, not just the period, but also the people who look back nostalgically to the Kádár era, as if in a trance. Péter Tímár does not so much demolish as ridicule and caricature the myth the “great generation” built up about themselves during those years. Apart from a few essentials, Dollybirds has nothing to do with the sixties: it is in every sense a film of the nineties. It looks back at an era with the eyes and intelligence of the millennium, and only wants to remember the good parts of it.
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The lighthearted Dollybirds shared the prize for best film in 1996 with a substantial masterwork. Attila Janisch was also honoured as best director for Long Dusk, which is based on the short story “The Bus,” by Shirley Jackson. Janisch and his regular co-scriptwriter, András Forgách, note that the script makes liberal use of the literary material. They borrowed only the metaphor of the bus journey, and developed it further, placing the story in a Hungarian landscape, in a Hungarian world. In their version, the main character does not confront her past or suffer for the fact that she has given herself away. There is no judgment - Long Dusk is not a moral story. This woman has simply become old and, in the strict sense of the word, she has to wake up to the fact that her life is at an end. A short while ago, she was celebrating her birthday and her latest professional success with her colleagues, when, answering an unexpected urge, she sets out on a journey in the familiar countryside, never to find her way back again. She gets on an old bus which, like a bad, bungling time machine jolts and shakes her very soul and takes her back to her childhood, to her parents’ house, to timeless times, to the beginning of the end. The film is about death, more precisely, dying. Which is not a precise moment - more a process. It is a task which we have to prepare for, a condition we have to fit into. The precise metaphor for this process becomes the journey with its own recurring passages, its beginning lost in the mist and its inconceivable end. The elderly woman - at first unconsciously, then of her own free will, sets out on the journey into the unknown.
Long Dusk says without words, simply with the strength of the images, and by making the story into a visual construct, the things we cannot talk about. The actors make no philosophical pronouncements or remember the past in gauzy flashbacks or make deep and meaningful declarations; there is only banal dialogue about the rain, the timetable, and plans to report the insolent driver. But the landscape, or a building or objects say much more than words; a field of golden sunflowers, a forest path disappearing into darkness, a petrol pump, an old lorry, a portrait of parents on the wall, a beautiful doll with real hair from a childhood long gone. And the human face is the face of Mari Törõcsik, who plays the old woman. This great actress lent her own ageing features and unembellished presence to the packed seventy minutes of Long Dusk.
János Szász’s film, The Witman Boys, hints at the unspeakable. His previous work, Woyzeck brought the director significant national and international recognition. After receiving prizes at the Hungarian Film Week and at various festivals, it was also awarded a major European prize, the Felix, in 1993.
The Witman Boys was made from a short story, “Matricide”, by the early twentieth century author Géza Csáth (1883-1919), and uses themes from his other stories. Csáth was almost as versatile a talent as his famous cousin, the poet and novelist Dezsõ Kosztolányi; besides short stories he also wrote plays and criticism. He came up to Budapest from southern Hungary and was a neurologist at a clinic in the capital. He wrote a strange book based on his practice in a genre which is difficult to categorize, Diary of an Insane Woman; the appearance of this book marked the beginning of the rediscovery of Csáth in the seventies and eighties. Despite a half finished life’s work and unfulfilled talent, he has had a cultlike following, especially for his short diary, which documents a tormented life and an increasing addiction to morphine. A collection of his stories, translated into English, made its way into Penguin’s East European classics series and ran into several editions.
The short story on which The Witman Boys is based, is a dark work, the chronicle of a matricide. The unexpected death of the father upsets the balance of the family; the boys find themselves in an emotional vacuum and discover with dismay the things that an orderly middle-class life had hidden from them up to now: that their mother does not love them and never did. In the absence of a father or authority figure, the children go their own way, loafing around, torturing and dissecting animals - researching the mystery of pain. They start with frogs, followed by cats and dogs and finally an owl. In the course of their aimless wanderings, they come across a brothel. One of the prostitutes is kind to them - as a whim or because she identifies with them. The boys are so starved of love and human contact that they practically become her slaves and when she asks them for a gift, they decide to bring her their mother’s jewels. The nocturnal invaders make a noise, the mother wakes up and the children stab her to death in cold blood.
Erzsébet Bori
is our regular film critic.
