Young
blond arrives home in high spirits to a block of flats in Pest. She has a few kind words
to her neighbour, then she enters the flat and the door is closed after her. She has spent
several days with her lover at one of the beaches and she is happy.
For a
few minutes it seems this can be just enough for a film. There is no money for more,
anyway. But why would it be necessary? Would it not be interesting to play with happiness
once and penetrate deep into it? What do we become in our uncontrollable inside pleasure?
What do we see on the walls of our room when we are rolling about, paralysed of the desire
to act? What makes space wide and colourful at the same time? Where do the troubles
disappear – the social, moral and philosophical dimensions? How can He fill out
everything? Or anything else that becomes Important?
Tamás
Sas's film is exposed as an exciting artistic challenge. Since our heroine is not at the
beach any more. There would not be enough
money for that. Therefore, there is no location into which her feelings could directly be
projected. She is in a block of flats in Pest. This is the location that can be afforded.
She magically has to turn a less friendly, isolated space into a paradise of the ecstasy
of love. The first signs hint that there are good chances to achieve this. Patrícia
Kovács's teenager-like actress personality is excitingly spontaneous in performing the
state of sees nothing, hears nothing', and Elemér Ragályi's approach as cameraman
makes the visual world pertinently open. It creates an atmosphere of authentic isolation
without the feeling of depressing naturalism, while it offers opportunities for
dramatisation through excluding all kinds of artificial sensation at the same time. This
flat is ready to adjust to emotional radiations and in the meantime it can preserve its
sociographical authenticity. Consequently, a modern (and feasible) film is to start, which
suggests no less discomfort than the possibility of relaxed discussions about it without
any rough, forced classification.
However,
the mobile phone rings, then a few personal objects open up inside monologues and it comes
to the surface that beyond the strange articulation of a state there is a conflict
situation present with a potential to stimulate decisions and deeds. The girl only wishes
to believe and make everyone believe that she is happy, or that she will be happy, as a
matter of fact she has been eating her heart out in a love triangle for a long time. Beams
of hope flash up, but her lover is by no means able to break up with his wife. This
fruitless expectation is not an empty topic on its own; yet, within the exposed limits it
represents some kind of a retreat that provides less excitement. The location, instead of
creating counterpoints to be resolved, swings back into the much plainer role of direct
state projection. Somebody is awaiting happiness with desperate stubbornness – on her
own, within walls and windows that open to walls. It is obvious that the brighter colours
turning up from time to time, the snatches of conversation referring to the participants
of the conflict and some minor situations of life are not able to go beyond being an
indication of how delusive hope is. The intensifying clarity of the situation makes
Patrícia Kovács less and less lively. She does not fill in the screen as a heart-broken
woman. It looks as if she lost the thread of the feeling of love, she simply becomes cold.
Or is this her original nature?
At
this point even her creators leave her on her own. She can whimper in a panel-like way,
she can become speechless with dismay, she can wallow, wander about in the kitchen and the
bathroom, she can forget into herself a little, she can put on some make-up, while along
the stereotypes and fashionable appearance a vain, selfish creature wishing to prove her
identity is emerging out of her more and more convincingly, who wants to get to Argentina
with a distinguished writer. Who is talking about love here? It is a triangle of panels in
a concrete panel block. It might as well be shocking. Since the man's words on the phone
and his television interview quite vehemently suggest a certain one-day-to-the-other
rottenness. They conceal a delicately suppurating little knot proving emptiness and the
cynicism of sulkiness, emotionless lust, bravely bearable lies. This is not the deviated,
painful yearning for happiness from the Tchekovian world of A Lady with the Little
Dog'. This is merely a choice of free time activities in the welfare society.
As
far as the uninterestedly grasping man is concerned, he could unbelievably easily sketch
such a state. Gábor Máté's voice makes even his commonplace sentences vivacious and
lively. On the other end, however, the
authors did not manage to create the figure of a woman struggling authentically between
her emotions and self-justification. Presumably they recon that they know her extremely
well, they throw her into observed situations and chains of sentences. Yet, they are
unable to sense her real nature.
And,
when the floating description of existence does not work in any form, acts should come.
Let everything be absorbed in a story presented in a delayed way. Let everything become
clear, a decision should be reached, let a perhaps predictable, but nevertheless an ear
splittingly thundering final twist put a full stop to the plot. No, this is not an
everyday passionate love, and not an everyday little triangle. The difference of age
straining between Éva and Tibor is twenty years, and at the beginning of their
relationship the girl was underage. Therefore the situation to be solved is a little
sickly, burdened with strange obsessions and father complex, where the rival wife is also
the stepmother at some point. However, it is quite expressive that the way in which love
and family links, natural and extreme feelings are blurred does not cause almost any
trouble at all. Affectation makes itself accepted with an appalling routine. The sparklers
of stage dramaturgy come into operation as well, real and imaginary, present and past are
more and more effectively dragged into the same sphere.
Death
may come. Éva makes her decision. It is not yet known who and how she is going to send to
the Other World, but eventually she finds herself. She prepares the scene for her act with
feminine toughness that radiates from her personality. She arranges her friend, Tibor's
wife and the police to visit her during her next date. She takes out gigantic knives.
While Tibor can only think of a perhaps tepid, but certain orgasm, the viewer foresees the
blood trickling from the man's mutilated, cooling body. Éva, however, makes the writer
first her husband with a common door-plate, then her murderer with fake traces, and
finally she herself runs into the knife led by the unconsciousness of love interlaced with
sweet revenge.
A
perfectly structured final sequence of scenes, which puts everything into brackets, it
locks everything up in itself. The spectacular death sweeps the heroine out of the space
of the narrative, in which voices that form the story can come to life for a few moments:
Tibor is taken away in police custody, the friend, the woman next door, is witness it with
dismay, ready to form her judgement, then Tibor's wife arrives. Cunning. It undoubtedly
verifies Tamás Sas's (and an increasing number of other Hungarian film directors')
idea that it is possible to tell a story in a film-like way in the cramped space of our
flats with just one or two characters. We live in such flats after all; this is what we
can afford. Their artistic spaciousness is becoming more and more obvious, but this hidden
dimension can only be exploited really prosperously with clearer conception also in the
deeper spheres and a higher degree of intellectual courage and expression-articulating
thoroughness. It would be worthwhile.
