Erzsébet Bori
Puppet Masters
Szabolcs Hajdu: Bibliothèque Pascal
This year's 41st Hungarian Film Week
brought no surprises. Of the thirty
feature films, half were enjoying their
premiere screenings as part of the
festival, while the other half were coproductions
done with Hungarian
collaboration that had already made it
to the theatres. There were new films
from two of Hungary's doyens of the
profession: Miklós Jancsó (So Much for
Justice) and Károly Makk (The Way You
Are); Márta Mészáros, following her
film about Imre Nagy, the prime minister
who was executed after the suppression
of the 1956 Revolution, again turned to
a major historical figure of the recent
past, Anna Kéthly, a trade unionist
and prominent figure in the Social
Democratic Party (The Last Report on
Anna) from 1922 until the German
occupation of Hungary in 1944 and in
the years immediately following the war.
The programme also included some
fascinatingly unusual works, such as
Andor Szilágyi's experiment with the first
film shot through the camera of a mobile
phone (Life Is Ahead of Us) or the bold
experiment with film language by director and cinematographer Sándor Kardos,
based on a tale by Rilke (The Gravedigger),
which merits some comparison
with French-born Chris Marker's experimental
classic, La Jetée (The Pier, 1964).
The prize which surely bears the most
peculiar designation—Best Genre Film—
was given to journalist András B. Vágvölgyi,
who was making his debut as a film
director with Colorado Kid, a film about
1956, the eponymous protagonist of which
is arrested in 1959, sentenced to 15 years
imprisonment, and released in the midseventies
to face what to him is an unknown
yet brave new world. The prize for
Best Director this time was split between
Zsombor Dyga (Question in Details) and
Róbert Pejó (The Camera Murderer). The
most outstanding work of the Film Week,
however, was undoubtedly Szabolcs
Hajdu's Bibliothèque Pascal, for which
András Nagy received the prize for best
photography. The film won Golden Reel for
Best Feature, the highest distinction of the
Film Week, and the Gene Moskowitz Prize
awarded by foreign film critics.
[...]
The frame story takes place in the office of
a Romanian childcare official. A young
woman by the name of Mona Paparu, the
daughter of a mixed marriage between a
Hungarian mother and Romanian father, is
seeking to regain custody of her daughter
Viorica, who is in the charge of the state.
As part of her petition she must give an
account of her family circumstances, but
more importantly she must explain her
reasons for having left the child in her
aunt's charge (from whom Viorica was
taken on the grounds of reckless
endangerment of the well-being of a
minor) and recount where she was and
what she was doing while she was abroad.
Mona tells a tale involving a fickle lover, a
venture that went pear-shaped, and a onenight
stand on the seashore with a lowlife
who is wanted by the police for assault and
battery (or is it homicide?) and claims to
have inherited paranormal abilities (he is
shot dead by a police squad the next day).
After giving birth to her daughter, Mona
makes a precarious living as a fairground
performer and a puppeteer until one day
her father, whom she has not seen in
years, turns up and informs her that he is
terminally ill, but can receive an operation
in Germany if accompanied by someone
who will look after him. Mona accordingly
boards a train bound for the West packed
with wretches and outcasts who are setting out in hopes of finding a better life,
and outright crooks who forge their own
luck by ripping off and exploiting the
unfortunate. Of course these slaves to
hope are also obliged to live as outcasts,
outside the law, and it is not easy to decide
who is the offender and who the victim
(many are both at the same time). Mona's
father (played by Nela Razvan Vasilescu,
who played the lead role in Lucian
Pintilie's marvellous 1992 film Balanta
(The Oak) sells his daughter off to people
involved in human trafficking, and whether
he does it for money or to save his own
skin, it does not pay off. Mona finds herself
in the bowels of a ship in the company of a
group of other girls from Eastern Europe,
and before long on an English meat
market where sex slaves are bought and
sold. Mona is singled out for his own use
by Pascal, the owner of the brothel, who
offers his élite regular clients illusions as
well as sex. In an institution reminiscent of
the brothel of illusions of Jean Genet's Le
Balcon, the prostitutes are dolled up as
literary characters, so that a paedophile
can choose Lolita or Pinocchio, and a
homosexual can find his Dorian Gray.
Mona first plays the part of George
Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, but as punishment
for her refusal to obey, she is given
the role in which it is customary to make a
last appearance: that of Desdemona.
[...]
Erzsébet Bori
is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular film critic.
