Erzsébet Bori
A Hopeful Run
The 30th Film Week 1999
Ildikó Enyedi: Simon Mágus (Simon Magus) Zoltán Kamondi: Az alkimista és
a szűz (The Alchemist and the Virgin) Ferenc Grunwalsky: Visszatérés (Homecoming) András Salamon: Közel a szerelemhez (Close to Love)
Can Togay: Egy tél az isten háta mögött (One Winter Behind God’s Back)
Péter Tímár: 6 : 3 Miklós Jancsó: Nekem lámpást adott kezembe az Úr Pesten (The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest)
[...]
Ildikó Enyedi found in Paris the modern-day equivalent of the capital of the Roman Empire; in the all-questioning, relativizing attitude of the gnostics, she identified a precursor of the enfants terribles of postmodern thinking. If my interpretation of the allusion is correct, then the message of all this is that appearances are deceptive: even when we firmly believe that we have come to the end of something, and all the indicators seem to confirm this, in actual fact we are only at the beginning.
In this film Enyedi at last had the opportunity of working with actors who suited her; Péter Andorai’s interpretation of the title role is masterful, almost effortless; so too are Mari Nagy and Julie Deslarmes, who is quite literally disarming and lyrical in her role as the young French girl. The casting is so perfect that her actors hardly have to open their mouths to give their characters life.
While both the soundtrack and Tibor Máthé’s camerawork are good, they do not stand out as separate from the film, but are fully integrated with it. This is largely thanks to the film’s clear, transparent and solid structure—a feature which, overall, was sorely lacking in this year’s film festival. To put it quite simply, Enyedi has learned her craft well, and she now uses her consummate professional skills as a tool. She has learned to do without things —and she knows how to make things invisible. Simon Magus has a message, it has a strong conceptual basis and is driven by a personal motive—but the message does not need to be spelled out; we do not need to be familiar with the early gnostics, nor indeed with the lives and the rivalry of Simon and Peter, in order to understand and enjoy the film.
The films made by the Közgáz [University of Economics] Visual Brigade never fail to astound me with their naturalness, their oafishness and their honest, productive messing about. Every frame they make is utterly believable. What does bother me, however, is the shoddiness, which they seem to have made into a ruling principle; these people are not saying that anything goes, they are saying that anything can be brought into the film. This is what happens if one turns down the services of a dramaturge; if they come across anyone or anything in the course of filming, then you can bet your shirt that it will be included in the film, and indeed it will have no less weight than the film’s central characters or leitmotif. It works, however, when they show something they think beautiful or interesting, or when for example the script says that the friends set out in heavy rain, and meanwhile in fact the sun is shining for all it is worth. A proper film crew in this situation would call a halt and either wait, or get the rain machine going; this crew, on the other hand believes in the power of the word, and they simply announce that now it is raining. This is exactly what they do in their Három (Variations for Three). The three referred to, incidentally, are life, death and love; or man, woman, child, or possibly something different entirely.
[...]
Péter Timár is nowadays a sure hand in the picture business at knocking out successes; audiences adore every other film he makes, but they go to see the rest as well. His latest, 6:3, looks set to repeat the unrivalled success of Dollybirds. Once again it is an amusing take on the past imperfect, on one of communism’s bleakest and most execrable periods. This time we see a string of images from life in the fifties, framed by that great and frequently polished trophy of our former glory, our so-called golden soccer team of the fifties. Undeniably Puskás, Czibor and company did leave behind an indelible memory for soccer fans everywhere; from the Highlands of Scotland to the pubs of London. I personally have heard people recite flawlessly the names of the eleven who beat England 6:3 in Wembley stadium in 1953.
[...]
Miklós Jancsó has made a major feature film again and, even more surprisingly, The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest has been doing very well for several weeks now. For once, at last, there is nobody throughout the length and breadth of the country who can claim not to understand the new film by Jancsó, who was in the past so often accused of being impossible to understand.
The director announces, and proceeds to light up every dark corner with its glow. There have been numerous attempts, using various artistic media and diverse genres, to capture the essence of what has been happening in Hungary during the nineties. Well, here we have it. Miklós Jancsó has it by the scruff of the neck. The story’s main drift concerns three jovial (timorous, sly, simple-minded) gravediggers who paddle and pedal, shovel and mow and still make a loss; they then undergo some amazing metamorphoses and transfigurations, they set up a company, they marry, they wipe out a family, climb to the highest heights and fall flat on their faces, just as in real life. Maybe one day a castle will stand on the site in the closing scene, but for the moment there is only the negative impression of the building, a grave, a hole into which one is invited to collapse when the dance is over.
Miklós Jancsó, however, does not believe in the last judgement, or perhaps he just doesn’t have the patience to wait for them to send someone from above to separate the good from the evil. He seizes a fire-hose—the cleansing stream of water is turned on himself too—and there will be those who do the wetting and those who get wet, not to say drenched. The three gravediggers, played by Zoltán Mucsi, József Szarvas and the phenomenal Péter Scherrer, along with the relations and business clients, all have a whale of a time for once; and the music again gives a wide berth to the usual pre-packaged clichés commonly used by Hungarian film-makers. Ferenc Grunwalsky, also involved as a co-writer, handles the camera with verve; the most memorable images are the total ones; the graveyard is a vibrant green, but nowadays it is more hectic than is normal, and it is no wonder that the deceased cannot rest in peace and are forever rising up again.
The film could not be more topical if it tried; entering the cinema from the street is almost less of a shift than going to the kitchen to fetch a beer in the advertising break. Everything we see on the screen fits seamlessly into the conventions of street performance and the stories of street theatre. Life and death, liberty and love, private misdemeanours and public morality; the familiar Hungarian methods of making money and changing careers blink back at us like well-known faces from the screen; this is what we get up to, this is how
we do it, and there’s not an allegory or a stylization in sight, let alone any hint of a parable. Jancsó is inviting the viewer to laugh. This robust farce, this commedia del’arte in cinematic form, makes us see the flip-side of those things which in real life send us into a rage, make us sad or rouse us to indignation.
[...]
Erzsébet Bori
is our regular film critic.
