I thought I’d inaugurate a new feature here, regular reviews of films of interest that I’ve seen. They may range from captions to essays, trivial to technical-jargony. I’ll be sure to flag any obvious spoilers, of course.
Saturday night I went to see Kontroll (Hungary, Nimrod Antal), which is showing as part of the Boston Film Festival. Cherry picking worthy films on the basis of a brochure of 1 paragraph synopses is a dicey proposition; fortunately, Kontroll was a great watch. Its narrative is hard to summarize, but basically goes as follows: the ticket collectors on the Budapest Metro face have to enforce a fare system that many try to get around through guile or force, and the protagonists have been assigned to the toughest line, populated with various sub-proletarian types (pimps, fascist thugs, transvestites) while catching heat from the “suits” running the Metro, who are concerned by the increasing number of suicide jumps. Only we see that the suicides are actually people pushed by a mysterious figure in black who clearly is meant to carry allegorical importance. The narrative’s central conflict has to do with the protagonist Balscu’s awareness of this dark figure, and his coming to terms with an unspecified past “above ground” that he’d left behind to join Kontroll.
Unsurprisingly, the Young Goodman Brown-esque allegory passes into downright cheesiness by the film’s end. But in all it does serve to anchor the actions of the film, tying together action-y scenes of chases or games of chicken in the subway tunnels with more atmospheric wanderings of the main characters through the underground labyrinth.
Generically, the film’s touchstones are obvious: the underworld milieu and black humor of Trainspotting, the kinetic, techno-infused feel and comic-vignettes-as-social-totality of Run Lola Run, and the dystopian tone of the Matrix. (The crediting of Music to one “Neo” gives away the game.) But the film isn’t mere copycat for a couple of reasons. First, the visual look of the film is stunning. Cinematographer Pados Gyula has a knack for the artificial lighting of the metro, and even when mobile the camera seems to be framing the action rather than merely following it. Second, the film does tap into something specifically Hungarian, particularly the crossroads of a second world nation entering Western European modernity. In this regard, the choice of Kontroll as a resonant profession is inspired: they’re the keepers of the rule of law in a culture which still does not fully recognize it. Finally, the Tarkovsky-esque science fiction tone is perfectly pitched. At no point does the action leave the present, yet one can’t help but feel one’s watching a future world commenting on our own. It’s a neat inversion of genre.
Kontroll deserves wider distribution than it’s likely to receive (it seems generically mismatched for US art cinema tastes), but I do see that it’s available on DVD already, at least in Europe.
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