Csaba Bollók's Iska's Journey most unexpectedly ran away with this year's Film Week, pulling away from even the most eagerly awaited films. As a director who started in the early Nineties, Csaba Bollók was caught up in the financial catastrophe that struck Hungarian cinema when state financing disappeared. By the time the industry staged a recovery of sorts, his generation had to scramble for the limited financing available, in competition with younger newcomers as well as with the established older names. Given that they had had no opportunity to put down any markers, it is little wonder that Bollók and his fellows found the going tough. He was thirty-five when he made his minimalist first film (North, North, 1999) on less than a shoestring. However, the restraint and proportion evident in that first film may not be the key to Iska's Journey. Nor may it be true to say that Bollók has had it easy, since there was no pressure of critical expectations on him-we simply don't know what expectations he had of himself.
To put it as plainly as possible, Iska's Journey is a masterpiece. Iska herself is an ethnic Hungarian aged fourteen who lives in a decaying industrial region of Romania with her unemployed, alcoholic parents and sickly younger sister, Rosie. During Communist times the Zsil (Jiul) Valley was notorious as a privileged region of mining towns, with civic and trade union leaders whose fiefdoms flourished there. The mines are still operating there, but with a fraction of their former workforce, the factories are simply rusting away. Anyone who could, left the region long ago; those who couldn't, are stuck in the most abject poverty. Our first sight of Iska is of her at work "ironpicking"- scavenging for lumps of iron, rejected castings, anything usable, that the slag heaps, the blast furnaces and foundries have bequeathed to the landscape. (Ironpicking is now rife everywhere in the old heavily industrialised regions of Eastern Europe that went bankrupt after 1989. A string of documentary films has been made about the iron-pickers of Hungary and Romania, Poland and the former Soviet Union.) Scavenging for iron is dangerous and dirty and the work falls to those at the end of the chain, many of them children; scrap dealers are the middlemen who send on the material to the recyclers. Alongside the dealers' yards there is sometimes a boozer to skim off immediately whatever slim pickings have been earned. In Russia the whole trade is in the hands of local mafias, who charge the scavengers for entry into the areas where pickings are to be had. At least Iska does not have that to contend with, but she does have her fellow pickers: in the struggle for a bare living, they are all too ready to rob the weaker, usually the children and the elderly. At home she gets neither love nor security: her mother, ravaged by the drink in which she has sought escape from poverty, beats her black and blue and won't feed her if she fails to bring home enough money. In between beatings (or to escape them) Iska slips away and steals from the local shops or begs scraps of food from the mineworkers' canteen.
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Iska and Rosie are eventually placed in care through the intervention of a mysterious stranger and find themselves onto a good thing, being fed and looked after. Yet, when she is visited by her mother, Iska elects to go home with her. (Here we learn that she and Rosie had been taken into care after being caught breaking into a shop.) The mother is only prepared to take Iska with her, she does not even bother to see the sick younger child. Once home, Iska soon absconds with a boy from the home who has come to look her up. The two sweethearts spend a pleasant day loafing around the town and decide to go off to the seaside. First, though, Iska wants to say goodbye to her sister. In the end, the boy takes the train on his own. On her way to the station, Iska accepts a lift from a car driver and ends up in the clutches of white slavers. Our last sight of her is on the ship carrying her and other girls off to an unknown destination abroad. A story like that should be unfilmable. It is almost impossible to eschew striving for effect, whether the approach taken is driven by emotion or by naturalism, yet Csaba Bollók has managed to avoid all the pitfalls. This is because of his documentary approach-this film hardly seems scripted at all-and almost total absence of any of the usual devices for relating or dramatising stories. (Major Hungarian documentaries such as Tamás Almási's Barren (on children iron-pickers) or Ibolya Fekete's Travels with a Friar (on a Franciscan in Romania who offers refuge and succour to children) make us aware of the authenticity of Iska's Journey.) The sense of a faithful reflection of reality is borne out by a wonderful cast, some amateur and some professional. The two girls-feisty, freckled Iska and puny, sad-faced Rosie-are "acted" by a pair of real-life sisters (Mária and Rózsa Varga), who come over as if a hidden camera had been tracking their lives. These two set an example for all involved in the film; the fact that they measure up to that must largely be put down to Bollók's self-effacement. Critics are often too willing to hand out accolades to the point that they become devalued, but this is not the case here. All the viewer has to do with Iska's Journey is to sit and watch. There is nothing that needs to be puzzled out or interpreted, nothing to guess and nothing to doubt.
The only reservation that comes to mind is the appearance of pimps and prostitutes at the end, with commonplace criminal aspects hijacking the film. Perhaps we are not so willing to confront the stumbling blocks our systems of child protection have to face. What to do when children, if given the chance, almost invariably opt to remain with their own parents or family, no matter how abusive or neglectful, rather than stay in an institution that can offer a secure environment? Or what about the dangers that attend adolescence, even for those from good backgrounds, and the regular failure of institutionalised care to cope with them. We may ponder whether the ending of Iska's story is banal or not, but the prostitution for which the girls on board the ship are bound is the most likely fate for Iska, only a couple of years younger than them. |
