Erzsébet Bori

Brave New Cinema

Kornél Mundruczó: Nincsen nekem vágyam semmi (This I Wish and Nothing More) András Fésős: Balra a nap nyugszik (Seaside, Dusk) - Frigyes Gödrös: Glamour

For many long years, we have been short on cinematic debuts in Hungary. Entire classes of directors have graduated from the Academy without producing a feature film as their diploma work, without an opportunity to introduce themselves. Last year, this negative trend was reversed, and this year has seen a real breakthrough. At the Budapest Film Week in February, it was the directors showing their first films who created the sensation; and, once the summer doldrums were over, distributors plucked up their courage: this autumn, three full-length first films were showing in Budapest cinemas. Kornél Mandruczó (This I Wish And Nothing More) was twenty-four, a second-year student director, when he was given his chance; András Fésős (Seaside, Dusk) is just under thirty; while Frigyes Gödrös (Glamour) was something of an outsider. He came from the world of amateur filmmaking, proving at the age sixty that it's never too late to begin-even for someone who, for decades, was not allowed to get any closer than that to the industry.

This I Wish And Nothing More created something of a storm, chiefly because of its bold choice of subject. Its protagonists are from the gay scene, in which they are a sort of underclass, rent-boys hanging around an elegant Danube promenade, waiting for their clients. This is a world unknown to most filmgoers, whose familiarity with these types-if any-is limited to the movie screen: the kids from the Piazza del Popolo and the boy gang in Gus Van Sant's My Home, Idaho, a tribute to Pasolini.

Not until the characters are riding the cable-car up to Buda Castle and come out with the words "I'd like to be Alain Delon, wearing sun glasses day and night" do we find where the film's title comes from-a song by the alternative ska band Channel Two. It also takes some time to work out just who is who, what he does, and who his partner is. At first, the character called Daddy might be taken to be Bruno's father, whose new family is not too happy to see the prodigal son born of the first marriage, and it's easy to interpret the "Two boys and one girl" triangle in the tradi-tional way as well. The four of them are protagonists: the well-heeled lawyer, formerly a family man, with a crush on rent-boy Bruno, giving him money, taking him into his house, and getting him out of scrapes. Ringo, the trusty friend and brother-in-law, is also hopelessly in love with Bruno, and so is Mari, the delicate, blond wife. The younger people live outside the city in an inherited half-completed house. Mari, an artiste, and Bruno, a hang-glider, are preparing a stunt they hope will catapult them to world travel, world audiences, fame and fortune. In the meantime, Bruno and Ringo get into a beaten-up Trabant twice a week and head for the capital and the life of the rent-boy, eking out the money that can be earned in public toilets or in the homes of clients by the occasional theft. Although prostitution itself is not a crime, it is a life that teeters on the edge of criminality, occasionally crossing that edge. Ringo is openly gay, but like someone intoxicated by his own courage, with nothing to lose. Mari lives in her own dream world, unaware-or, rather, refusing to be aware -of where the boys go, how they get the money; while "Daddy" desperately tries to keep himself together and keep up appearances. Bruno is the central figure of the film: it's him that everybody wants, everybody dances attendance on him, and he is the one who commits the tragic offence. He steals, deceives and lies, leads a double life, all the while imagining himself to be some kind of laconic cowboy cantering unblinkingly through all the slime and drek of life. He swears, and he is firmly convinced, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with him, he's not gay like "them", but a loving husband in a happy marriage, and the meatrack is just a way of making your bread until something better turns up and the big dream comes true. Is it possible to live such a lie and get away with it? It seems to be, for a time at least. Bruno brings ruin on everyone around him, and then rides away. Even Ringo's death fails to force him to face the facts: all he feels is that the ground is slipping away from under his feet, but he doesn't search inside himself, he simply puts the blame on Mari.

The film avoids the pitfalls of naturalism, but these do not include either sanctimoniousness or lying. Its elements are alternately humourous and grotesque, resorting, at certain points, to that tried-and-tested weapon of filmmakers, the cut. The absurd scenes (the Chippendale Show improvised before the expert eyes of women police officers, or the customer in purple silk clothes ordering a cleaning of some clogged pipes) are most effective. They manage to boldly overstep the boundaries of reality, yet any Budapest taxi driver could tell you even more hair-raising stories. Characteristically, the most naturalistic scene in the film is a family reunion, with papa and mama coming to Sunday lunch, whose main course, only a short time before, was white with red eyes, unsuspectingly munching on a carrot. The rabbit stew might prompt some to head for the exit, but many would not even sit down to see this film after reading any brief synopsis in programme guides.

This I Wish And Nothing More is not a film about prostitution, not even about homosexuality, but about lies. Its heroes are not street lads but human beings dogged by misfortune; the more they try to run from their destiny, the more hopelessly they are entangled. And that is not a predicament unique to prostitutes or the gay, but part of the human condition.

The film allows life to run its course, lets the characters tread their own path, and leaves the viewer in peace-giving as much freedom as is seldom to be enjoyed in the cinema these days. It does not try to offer a philosophical scheme or interpret things, events or motivations. That's where it gets its credibility from. The poetically young director-in Hungary, a twenty-something can, at best, hope to be a lyrical poet; it's the forty-year-old novelists and film directors who are more likely to be called "up-and-coming"-has totally departed from the standard clichés. It could be that was done all the more boldly because he doesn't even know them. He does not follow any models, and if we are reminded of the first, rough-hewn works of the French New Wave, this is only attributable to the rough-hewn nature of his talent. But talent it is, and no mistake.

In András Fésős's film, we meet a blind young man or, to be more precise, a young man who is going to go blind. What we do see is a messy life headed for utter disaster-and some vague, dimly felt desire for change. The hero (Levis 501, a fake World War Two bomber jacket-a legend coming to new life-and a remarkable collection of sun glasses) contracts for just one more smuggling trip (drugs). Although the spirit is willing, there is a lack of an exit strategy, so the flesh-is-weak principle prevails. Just the recipe for a deus-ex-machina turn. You can call it what you will: kismet or a stupid accident: Alex gets mixed up in a family row, is involved in an accident, returns without his car or his cargo from his last journey and has gone blind. His new condition, which he bears with dignity, itself offers at least a basis for starting a new life, but it is romantic love that brings ultimate salvation.

The woman is called Maria, a Hungarian expat living at a fair distance from the old country, in a vacation resort in the former East Germany, on the island of Rügen. Hers too is a lonely life, and she too is waiting for redemption. Here, too, divine intervention is called on to bring together two individuals-one blind, in Budapest and the other living in the distant north-who were destined for each other; the machinations of the gods are unmistakable, even if they try to make it look as though it were simply just another wrong number. Once on the line, Alex parades his best spiel, drawing a serene response of "scumbag" from the dream lady: an infallible omen of a big romance in the offing. The first call was a wrong number, but the ones that follow are intentional. Slowly but surely, they do hit home, too. In the meanwhile, we get a pretty serious misunderstanding, thanks to Zsolt, a childhood friend; but anyone whose affairs are arranged at the highest level cannot fail to win in the end.

Once the main title comes up, András Fésős thoroughly scares his audience: a philosophical dialogue in German between two kids on swings, and then a recital by a lonely old man instantly carry us into the sky above Berlin. After the credits, however, we seem to find ourselves watching another of those hackneyed old Hungarian gangster movies-that in itself is a pretty scary feeling. But, from this point onwards, events take a lucky turn, in that the hero goes blind, removing him from the Hungarian underworld once and for all. But Wim Wenders does return to stay with us, as we watch Alex's shambolic goings-on. Indeed, his presence no longer annoys us, and we receive him as a long lost German friend. And when he introduces himself to Maria as Alex Winter, we can only applaud the choice of a name that Wenders often gives to his favourite characters, one that suits him so well.

András Fésős evinces a surprising sense of proportion for a director on his debut: in the way he constructs his narrative, plans and composes his images, and in how he utilizes the modest resources available to a Hungarian filmmaker. He knew what he wanted, picking the sort of partners that best enabled him to translate his ideas onto the screen as closely as possible. The dialogue is incredibly life-like. (Gábor Németh co-wrote the script and has already in Presszó (The Café), proved his skills as a screenwriter). The music, by Tibor Szemző, is wonderful; and András Nagy, the most promising of the new generation of cinematographers, absolutely deserved the prize for cinematography. The actors are very good: Győző Szabó puts on a no-frills performance as the blind man; the only quibble one might make is that some of the quicker exchanges between Alex and Zsolt (László Keszeg) are not sufficiently clear. Andrea Takáts, not seen so far, etches the figure of Maria with flawless sensibility. Seaside, Dusk is a worthy example of how, instead of making a desperate lunge to pack everything in, it's possible to pick the best of everything-meaning the best of all that was reasonably achievable and consonant with the basic concept of the film.

Frigyes Gödrös is not exactly a prolific director; indeed, looking at his films and his career, I would even say he is not the combative type. Following a short film he made in collaboration with Miklós Kornai, Da Capo, he teamed up with Dr Putyi Horváth, in Private Horváth and Friend Wolfram, which was screened at the '94 Film Week. Then, after a long break, and even longer in the making, his first full-length feature film was finally produced. Glamour was shooting for close on five years, and we can safely add to this two more years if we think of the novella the script was based on and the scenes that had already been fine-tuned in the earlier film.

Private Horváth and Friend Wolfram was an amateur film, through and through: cheap, black-and-white, and personal. Yet, its appeal was by no means restricted: it did manage to break out of the classic formula where "We and our pals make a film about ourselves and our pals", a formula, of course, not to be belittled in any way as long as it aspires to reach a wider audience beyond the immediate relatives, friends and customers of the makers. What enabled Private Horváth and Friend Wolfram to pull this off was that the two heroes/filmmakers profiled their own families. In doing so, one of them was able to use the family films his grandfather made; the other had to reconstruct his recollections, and stage the landmark events in the life of the family.

The family is capable of miracles. If I can see what his pram was like, what he was given for Christmas, or what his mother had in her coffee, I will be curious to find out what Dr Putyi Horváth thinks about happiness, which I would otherwise be utterly indifferent to. I was captivated by Private Horváth and Friend Wolfram: what better proof of my profound admiration for it than the fact that I saw it again and again at every opportunity, not getting up even on the fifth occasion when Gödrös trundled Dr Horváth into the empty landscape.

That film had introduced some of the momentous elements in the legendry of the Gödrös family. These include the father's abandonment of his Jewish roots, so that, for him "the thread is broken"; the German girl from the Reich, chosen to bring in fresh blood; the upholsterer's-cum-furniture shop braving the storms of history; the hiding place leading from the wardrobe into the cellar, where Jews and army deserters, including a Wehrmacht officer brother of the mother, together ride out the war.

A Jewish Hungarian (Hungarian Jewish) fate, the life paths of three generations in 20th-century Hungary: a formula that draws almost instinctive parallels with István Szabó's movie Sunshine.

But first, a few words about this soup business. Meat-soup is a metaphor for survival, family cohesion and the retention of values. Soup is the first course in a traditional Hungarian meal, and without it the meal is not complete. Soup is the first casualty when poverty strikes, when shops run out of food, when there is political upheaval or a basic shift in lifestyle. Looked at from the perspective of soup, modernization, with the added burden of Socialism, has been something like a scorched-earth raid in terms of the havoc it has wreaked. When, in the basement refuge, the family sink their spoons into a rich meat-soup, German and Hungarian Orthodox Jew and convert to Christianity, boss and employee, Jewish labour camp inmate and deserter from the front alike defy the spirit of the age; and, not much later, in the '50s, they show their contempt for the régime by the charade of displaying a bowl of "paprika potato stew" (a staple dish of poor families) to the inquisitive eyes of the caretaker checking on what the tenants put on their tables, and then conspiratorially sitting down to a candle-lit dinner of soup behind drawn shutters.

Soup is synonymous with abundance, a preservation of tradition, resistance and freedom. In 20th-century Hungary, there was every reason to hold so tenaciously onto the soup-bowl if one was going to survive, especially if one was Jewish. Here there was no organic development or honest, gradual improvement of one's financial status-almost every generation had to start from scratch, because, as the grandfather puts it, "In this country, they always take something away from somebody." As for the father, to him Switzerland is the country of his dreams, the happy country which has no historical eras. Because "historical era" means that people come driving the cars or motorbikes of the day, flaunting government ordinances or guns, and off they carry your chest of drawers.

The family business started in the pre-war years tosses on the churning, hostile waters like the ship of state in Greek poetry. It is, alternately, a relative dressed in a German uniform, the grandfather with his sidelocks, or a trusty assistant learning to be a proletarian, who has to be asked to post himself at the shop door to avert any imminent threats. And, surprise, the heroes of Glamour all escape the worst.

"Falsification of history", a charge also levelled at István Szabó by some of his critics. Sunshine is a "big movie", not only in its execution, but, more importantly, in the sense that it views the significant events from the perspective of history and philosophy, rather than from the viewpoint of the particular individual forced into or caught up in these situations. So much so, that even the shaping of the characters was carried out downwards: it's not flesh-and-blood figures we see, not the victims crushed under the wheels of the relentless advance of history, but types whose fate serves to illustrate age-specific situations -models with some flesh added on to make them look like real individuals, some features to give them a face. Glamour, by contrast, works from precisely the opposite starting point: it is every bit a "small movie", happy to look no further than the world of a child, which orbits round the parental suns from which it receives light and warmth, and beyond which there is no life. Questioning the father's choice (a betrayal, in the eyes of the grandfather) is quite out of the question. The father decides on assimilation, and then runs and hides because he wants to stay alive, and-if possible-to keep the shop, too; on Fridays, the lucky survivor waits for his wife with a pillow in his hands at the bedroom door. The mother holds out, embroidering red hearts on the shirts and the pillow-cases, cooking the meat-soup, raising her pelvis every Friday, gripped, now and then, by nostalgia for home. Is there any room for moral questions here?

Questions, indeed, more properly to be put to those who took the nation into war, losing half the country in the process. The grandfather would not, for the life of him, air his views on politics, but he knows exactly just where he stands on all these issues.

Both Sunshine and Glamour make only the vaguest of referenc to historical turning-points, but where the former stylizes upwards, the latter does so downwards. Of course, the film treats this from the bottom, with a fair amount of irony; the figures who represent successive terror régimes tend to be more comic and subject to human frailty than frightening. Which is not necessarily to be put down to the director's mode of vision, his generous heart and the all-embracing "glamour"; it could, equally, flow from the survivors' sense of humour.

The film deserves credit for mostly succeeding in portraying events through the eyes of a child. We get a sense of fracture in the flow of the narrative where it arbitrarily switches its point of view. Intimately familiar as the world of grownups is to the child, it is equally mysterious, with the adored parents the most mysterious of all. So when he wants to talk about them, mould their lives into a story, it is not enough to collect the family's trove of anecdotes and piece together his own personal recollections; after all, a family legendry is a tangled web of elements of fact and fiction. The son, too, will need his imagination if he wants to picture his parents as children or passionate lovers, or his own family without himself in it.

The literariness of the words of the narrator are therefore not disturbing but using a narrator in a film is always a risky decision and only on the rarest occasions is the overall effect a happy one. Glamour does have some scenes that seem overshadowed by the commentator, leaving little room for the images to live in. But the biggest problem, the most abrupt change of style, comes where the child claims a central role for himself in the history of the parents. In the episodes on the 56 tram or that of the "hanging judge", the unity of the film sunders, with tender or mocking irony giving way to passion. Glamour has not turned out to be twice as good as the portion of Private Horváth and Friend Wolfram devoted to the history of this same family.

Cast, images and music play a pivotal role in imposing unity on a film that, building from episodes, is protean in its visual style as well. Károly Eperjes inserts himself into the role of the father with his accustomed assurance, and here, too, he can do no wrong. The surprise is György Barkó's performance: the Orthodox Jewish grandfather with patriarchal ambition that he brings to life is at once realistic and a caricature; it is authoritative, intimidating and loveably comical. The other surprise is Eszter Ónodi: an actress at the beginning of her career could well be thought to be too young for the mother's role; added to this is the fact that she scarcely has any lines: she has to depend on gestures and her eyes to get across that she is a German girl, a woman in love, and a loving mother.

The music, by László Melis, is highly allusive, preserving its humour even where the story loses it. A modest budget means a pivotal role for those responsible for the film's look, the cinematographer, the costume designer and the art director. Glamour is one of those rare works where an aesthetic approach to the photography is not a handicap. Sándor Kardos is visibly in his element, not only where beauty is the concern. Sometimes he accentuates the grotesqueness of a scene by running a rear view of the proceedings (officers arriving or departing in an automobile or on a motorbike on their property-seizing missions), and sometimes he counterpoints an exuberance of feeling (on the face of the parents in love) by shooting from below with a distorting lens.

Glamour is a curious film. It has as many flaws as there are stars in the sky, but, as you watch, these tiny, twinkling dots slowly fade from view, so that all you see is a golden shine, a radiant light. Glamour, if you like.