White Palms is not a sports movie. Of course, none of them is. The heartbreaking story of a basketball player or a boxer, a hockey player or a rugby champion is never merely the triumph of the actual sport. These are studies of fights, stories of struggles against the world, but mostly against the sportsman himself. In sport movies struggle is value in itself, as is in sports: the very content. Winning is a must but the goal is not the first prize – even B-category TV-productions make it until there –, it is rather to overthrow ourselves, to leave behind our own shadows.
Stating that White Palms is more than a gymnast-story is not a very original idea, since Szabolcs Hajdú is more or less telling the story of his gymnast brother. In the year of 2002, a new trainer, Miklós Dongó (Zoltán Miklós Hajdú) arrives to the Canadian gymnast-club of Calgary. The plot then immediately takes us back to two decades earlier, when we see a sadist trainer (Gheorghe Dinica) suppling children to be gymnasts in the club of the Hungarian city Debrecen. The training is filled with different kinds of torture, but the talented Dongó, then ten years of age (Orion Radies), still seems to be favored.
A bit farfetched analogy: we are in 2002 again, when – as a punishment for training abuse – Dongó is charged with the duty of turning Kyle (Kyle Shewfelt), the impossible to handle young hope of the Canadian club into a competitor. Then again, a bit awkward switch to Hungary of the eighties (1983, Debrecen): the little Miklós Dongó (Silas Radies) by now as adolescent realizes that it is possible to say no. He runs away from the training and – though without hail – even talks back to his trainer who is not the Greatest God anymore, just an idiot. As a lonely warrior, he joins a touring circus company.
For the leading part, the director chooses an amateur: his own brother. Zoltán Miklós Hajdú plays himself. His artlessness is disarming. Kyle, the young Canadian gymnast also plays himself – the two of them are master and disciple in real life too. Transferring their relationship into the movie is a brave directorial decision. This already gives the piece a cinema verité character, as does the featuring of media celebrities (a tool rather preferred among Hungarian directors) – Zsuzsa Csisztu’s act as the interviewer of the 2002 championships’ competitors is for once truly reasonable.
The same verité-like braveness operates the camera: extreme simplicity giving lusterless and functional pictures with the tools of Dogma 95 – confined to mere representation, usually seen in hard dramas.
White Palms is often criticized for its unevenness – while the parts showing Dongó’s a childhood are intensive and strict, the story of the adult man who left his home and became a trainer is rather dull and of no interest.
Yes. There is a breach in the style. However, our aspect of interest concerning the 2000’s is not the same as concerning the pictures of the childhood. A less moving, differently empathized part follows the honest and humane new-waveish childhood-story that is definitely based on empathy towards the boy’s character.
It can cause a sense of breach that new wave usually does not make us uncritically empathize with young adult men. However, if realizing our vision’s movie historical definitiveness we surrender to watch the childhood-part as a classic new waveish story, together with the adult parts we do get a coherent story and a particularly even atmosphere. Personalness, being thrown into existence and emptiness leads us from one style or story to the other. Their mediator is the absolutely natural camera movement that even lets room for emptiness.
The adult parts’ flatness completes the movie’s real drama, which is not only the drama of torturing, or of the oppressed child who is deprived of his freedom and the chances of meaningful existence. It goes further than Truffaut’s child freedom-fighter classic, the Four hundred Blows does. The four hundred-first blow is the emptiness torn amongst the ribs of the story. Anticipation, loneliness, and nothingness. It is only now that these, present in the adult life of Miklós Dongó just as naturally as in his childhood, accomplish themselves and become ultimate. The order of life does not change; only the charm of childhood disappears. It does not make a difference whether he is adult or child, living in the US or in Hungary, trainer or trainee.
Dongó is a lonely fighter determined to loose. He does not even defeat himself – or rather: his resignation is his victory. Leaving sports movies’ terminology behind, in the dimension external to sport there is no such thing as victory or defeat, just a disposable life bearing its tries and faults. Victory is acceptance. This concept is very different from the classic western sports movie’s conception focusing on winning and losing. Miklós Dongó’s career as a gymnast – or its narrative so concentrated that it leaves no room for any other element – immanently contains emptiness. Accepting everything without ever judging anything – the unbearable lightness of being.
Dongó’s only relationship is the one with the first unmanageable, later tame Canadian gymnast youngster, Kyle. Family is only represented as a group of aggressors, we do not see friends (just a guy from the same club), nor lovers. Restricting territory to this degree is a firm directorial intention. What we watch is neither a life story nor the story of a gymnast – it is existence: a highlighted base of sensations formulated about being.
Through childhood’s struggles against authorities, one learns to fight against nothingness also. Moments of emptiness are the strongest in the movie: pictures of preparation before the first training are shown in one twenty minute-long scene. Minutes of the „not yet happening” are tense and yet boring – as in real life. They are mandatory. Just like training, anticipating before training, the smell of the gym and the creaks of the gymnastic apparatus all belong to this necessity. Lean pictures of superficial existence and saunter are the most thorough. Tension cumulates – tension of obligation, subjection and existence in these moments.
Gymnastics is a solitary sport and so it is even harder to struggle against emptiness. The petty circumstance that the adult Miklós Dongó smokes – as we learn in the first scene of the movie – deepens his loneliness even further, since this bad East-European habit is hardly tolerated in Canada. His loneliness therefore lengthens with weightless but hopeless minutes that he spends expelled to doorways and backyards. As a child, Dongó is extremely lonely too. One of the movie’s most intensive scenes is the silent bustling of the boy sent out to treat his wound.
The hopeless filthiness of the basin in the dressing-room: the bubble gum, the soaked sponge, and the broken tap represents the quintessence of the eighties. Not only on the material level though; Szabolcs Hajdú treats this layer much more delicately.
In the past few years, several young Hungarian directors tried to screen the eighties [Dániel Erdélyi: Előre! (Let’s go!), Mihály Buzás: Kis utazás (Short Journey), Ferenc Török: Moszkva tér (Moscow square)], but they never made it further than listing small realisms. Environment was not the background of these movies, but their newly discovered content. They were nice tries including rousing realizations, but none of them was able to incorporate the material with such naturalness, avoiding mannerism and bragging. Szabolcs Hajdú did not leave everything to the ingredients.
The homely camera movement that shows objects and actions and does nothing more, intensifies his naturalness. Just like the narrative, it does not judge anything at all. It makes fools of the parents with a few subtle tricks, but the act of discrediting the trainer already depends on the actors’ play. He employs classic visual tricks gently: the terrified boy’s head outcrops between his parents’ shoulders – threat’s well-known overhead camera position and languid ansnitt. Conventional tool – but by András Nagy its common and familiar straightness blends delicately with the contingency of the way the ever settling camera treats areas and people since the beginning of the film, uniformly. The civil modality sliding into the subjective of the lead character (at certain points into the child’s perspective) is the informality that, by the end of the movie, turns the gymnast not into a hero, but into a human being.
It is particularly interesting how Ferenc Darvas’s suggestive music intensifies the decomposed (or rather intentionally not-composed) pictures. Being unusually untuned [!] for a background music it gives depth to the absolutely conventional pictures of the cab drawing in, right at the beginning of the movie. At the end, the similarly deep music of Dorfmeister (?) [or Kruder’s(?)] accompanies the gymnast’s rising, sounding transcendent overtones: bowed to his role in the image theatre the adult man, functioning as a piece of the scene mingles with the other living pieces of scenery.
At the end, the competition scene disappointed many. Dongó’s illegal and life threatening debut in the circus edited together with the adult competition is the duplication of the familiar competition montage. We worry for the initiated child-line and – though much less – for the performance of the mature Dongó at the same time. The difference is that while in the first case we worry for his life (though of course he survived: we see him as an adult), in the second, he rather runs a last round for order’s sake. The first excitement blacks out the second. The bygone circus line adds just as much to it as, being without stake, the present competition takes. However, the viewer’s questions occur concerning the main character’s fate in both cases, only this time in an unusually duplicated way. So these are not only „what will happen?” questions but also „what had happened?” ones. Moreover, what will happen depends on what had happened. It is only Dongó himself, who knows the past, the real stake; our tension – and at the same time, stakelessness too – arises from our not-knowing.
Edition, rationing of tension and slow-down let into the so far unstylized and bare dogma-movie are all classic tools of plotting a competition. Fatality of the momentary coordination problem, absurdity of its importance are pictured with a clever montage built up according to the best tradition: magnifying and endlessly extending the slip seconds of the false move, then lining up the following concurrent reactions. Professional tool-set, accomplished utilization – no one should find a fault with that. Accustomed to the tradition, we are waiting for the Big Match of the master and his discipline: someone is to prove, something is to emerge. Absence shows in the stake. In the interview preceding the competition Kyle says, „I want to win” while Dongó says, „I don’t want to win”. From this point on, nobody should bring to book for the American-type contest representation (of which all other accessories has been successfully employed). Competition is not important. However, this is not the deficiency of the tension-raising ability – it is rather the mapping of the inner state. For a story that was riven away from a gymnast’s destiny, this is the necessary ending.
(01-06-2006)
