Kinoblog

To say that the films of the young (b. 1974) Hungarian director György Pálfi are an acquired taste is no more than a statement of the obvious, but it’s already clear from Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006) that he’s potentially one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from European cinema in a great many years.

I was lucky enough to see Hukkle without any advance warning – my editor handed over a VHS tape and suggested that it might be my sort of thing. It was. Like most viewers, I found it highly disconcerting at first, but once I’d grasped the principle that it essentially extended the concept of Microcosmos and similar natural history documentaries to encompass the human occupants of a small village, I took to it immediately. On the one hand, the notion that human beings have no greater significance in the wider scheme of things than ants, snakes, frogs and cats is deeply pessimistic and cynical (though, as Taxidermia amply demonstrates, wholly consistent with Pálfi’s apparent worldview), but on the other, it’s no more than the simple truth.

There is no significant spoken dialogue at all, and subtitles are only needed right at the very end, when two thematically relevant songs are performed at a wedding. Even the central narrative strand, in which the women of the village appear to be bumping off their menfolk through poisoning (the poisons, of course, being extracted exclusively from the local flora) seems merely a part of the overall texture – though it ties in with an overriding theme about the essential uselessness of the male sex. In particular, a cut from a close-up of a pig’s swaying, grotesquely swollen testicles to a bowling ball speaks volumes in a fraction of a second.

Hukkle was disproportionately successful for a first feature, especially from an unknown Hungarian first-timer, and Pálfi duly managed to raise a substantially bigger budget for his second, Taxidermia. This time, homo sapiens is centre-stage and the dialogue is wall-to-wall (one of the first scenes has a hapless orderly reciting an insanely lengthy list of duties to his commanding officer), but the sourly dyspeptic view of humanity remains consistent. It comprises three stories, set in the 1940s, the 1960s and the present day, the protagonist of each being father to the next.

There seems little doubt that the film was deliberately made to be as provocative and taboo-breaking as possible, with particular attention paid to graphic depictions of assorted bodily functions. In the first story, we have graphic masturbation, ejaculation (fire as well as semen) and copulation (with a thankfully dead pig as well as a live woman), the second dwells on speed-eating and equally copious vomiting (I said in my Sight & Sound review that the characters here made Monty Python’s notorious Mr Creosote look genteel), while the third is concerned with the body’s complete breakdown, either through terminal obesity or self-administered taxidermy. I originally reviewed the film off a timecoded DVD screener, but seeing it on the big screen with a small but vocal audience added a whole new dimension – I have this mental image of Pálfi staging loads of preview screenings and timing the gross-out moments to match the audience response.

The production values are matched by a more ambitious thematic approach. Each of the central characters – the WWII orderly Vendel Morosgoványi (Csaba Csene), the champion speed-eater Kálmán Balatony (Gergely Trócsányi, later Gábor Máté) and the taxidermist Lajos Balatony (Marc Bischoff) is driven by overriding obsession, whether with sex (Vendel), gluttony (Kálmán) or professional perfectionism (Lajos, who is adept enough to stuff a human embryo). All three have disastrous personal relationships: Vendel is reduced to voyeurism and fantasising (even about Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl), Kálmán’s marriage seems purely one of convenience (his wife cheats on him on their wedding day, then leaves him because she had a more lucrative offer from America), and Lajos’s only human contact other than his father and his clients seems to be with bored sales assistants in the supermarket – who have clearly written him off as a weirdo in advance, on account of the vast amount of food he purchases for the now immobile Kálmán.

Pálfi’s technical virtuosity, already well established in Hukkle, takes full advantage of the bigger budget, show-stoppers being a series of 360˚ tracking shots over a bathtub (as opposed to around it) to illustrate its multiple functions, a child’s pop-up storybook seamlessly turning into an actual set with live actors, CGI-aided vomiting and the all too physical special effects of the final sequence. They’re also better integrated into the overall conception than some of Hukkle’s conceits, which I felt occasionally betrayed a desire to show off (for instance, a Tex Avery-inspired transition where the film jumps its sprockets and the camera pulls back to reveal a bead curtain made up of film strips).

Hukkle has had quite a few English-friendly DVD editions. Despite my endorsement on the box (of the film, not the disc), the worst appears to be Soda Pictures’ UK edition (region 2 PAL), reviewed by DVD Times here. Soda can’t be blamed for some BBFC snippage (non-negotiable cuts concerning animal cruelty), and they do at least offer an anamorphic picture, but the sound is plain stereo and there are no extras. The US (Home Vision Entertainment, R1 NTSC) and Hungarian (Mokép, R2 PAL) discs are far superior – the extras are virtually identical, but the Hungarian edges ahead for its inclusion of a DTS 5.1 soundtrack. Here’s an overview:

Picture: Pretty much flawless: anamorphic, framed at 1.85:1, with virtually no visible blemishes on the print and none on the transfer. Given the director and cinematographer’s personal involvement with this release, I think it’s safe to assume it represents exactly what they wanted.

Sound: This was apparently the first Hungarian film to be mixed in 5.1 surround sound from the start, and the DVD duly serves up two surround options, in Dolby Digital and DTS. I selected the latter, and it sounded fabulous, quite literally adding a whole new dimension to a film that I’d only previously watched on VHS. Surrounds are used discreetly but fairly continuously, while the subwoofer supplies some equally subtle but very effective Lynchian rumblings, especially when underground, underwater or (paradoxically) surveying the landscape from up in the clouds. As with the picture, I can’t see how this presentation could be significantly improved upon.

Subtitles: The main feature has (and needs) virtually no subtitles, but the song lyrics at the end come across convincingly enough. All the extras also have subtitles, and while they clearly weren’t written or typeset by native English speakers (there are numerous typos and other grammatical infelicities), this is never at the expense of comprehension.

Extras: There are several extras, starting with a highly technical commentary from György Pálfi and cinematographer Gergely Pohárnok that goes into extreme detail about how they achieved particular shots (and reveals that the pig’s name was Jimmy), but offers next to no food for interpretative thought. I suspect this was entirely deliberate. Equally vague are the “making-of” documentary (more of a free-form video diary) and the other video extras, though it’s fun to see outtakes that didn’t make it into the final cut – notably a timelapse shot of a decomposing cat that could have seen service in Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts.

As for Taxidermia, it’s just been released in Britain on a disc from Tartan (Region 2 PAL) that sounds pretty bare-bones, so I’m waiting to see what the Hungarians come out with before splashing out (an unfortunate metaphor under the circumstances, but I’ll leave it in). It’s also out in France on France Télévisions (also Region 2 PAL), but only with French subtitles.

Links

• Official websites for Hukkle and Taxidermia – a distinct cut above the promotional norm, and bilingual in Hungarian and English
• IMDB entries for Hukkle and Taxidermia
• KinoEye piece on Hukkle by Andrew James Horton (18 November 2002)
• Interview with György Pálfi in The Guardian (Phil Hoad, 12 July 2007)
• Reviews of the theatrical release of Hukkle by Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Philip French (The Observer), J. Hoberman (The Village Voice), Michael Wilmington (Chicago Tribune)
• US DVD Reviews of Hukkle: Gary W Tooze (DVD Beaver – with lots of frame grabs), Glenn Erickson (DVD Savant), Jon Danziger (Digitally Obsessed), Todd Brown (DVD Talk)
• Reviews of the theatrical release of Taxidermia by Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian), Eddie Cockrell (Variety), Philip French (The Observer), Matthew Sorrento (Film Threat)
• Review of the Tartan DVD of Taxidermia by Slarek on DVD Outsider