Erzsi Báthory

Sonatas of Chopin, accompanied by dog-barking

The Smallest Foundation of the World


Dorottya Udvaros,
Balázs Foky and
Hédi Temessy

112 KBytes
As if it has been decided that brains must be kept cracked quite until a truly audience-deterring title is found. Whoever cares for a foundation set up by a couple of nobodies, for no particular purpose, out of no money - , provided that the smallest also stands for the most meaningless and the most superfluous. But smallness can also be viewed in a three-dimensional perspective, yet what does it promise even then?! In all likelihood, one must be a feverishly ardent movie-enthusiast to feel an insatiable desire to learn to know the object or organisation (?) coded in such a way.

Yet if the movie-enthusiast still makes up his mind to see this film, he will not regret his decision. In the first image-sequence, there are four people on a magnificent, stunningly clean hill-top in Normandy, seen to be small because observed from a high sky. The camera rotates persistently, to let us have enough time to realise their isolation from the world and each other. Our narrator, a precocious little boy with a dispassionate voice, (a protagonist) does not recall his childhood memories from the past but re-experiences them again with us, narrating them in parallel with the events, always using the present tense. He fails to comment on the scene - he is describing exactly what viewers are watching. This is how the film-makers indicate that he knows no more of the environment or the background, - or about the world for that matter, - than the audience do.

One learns to know the starting-point of events relatively early in time. The widowed Hungarian countess living in France, who arrives to Hungary in a Citroen driven by a driver previously named Pista but now turned Etienne, establishes a charitable dog-home together with the little boy's mother on a God-forsaken farm owned by the family's one-time general servant. Out of the void-filled sequence of events, the fates of the main characters slowly become discernible; both the countess' and the young mother's husband (the little boy's father) used to be major characters of the Hungarian political scene. The latter hanged ten years ago, his widow and his half-orphan receive national assistance from the government. The money is spent on the dog-home, because, as the mother tells his son who is claiming a pair of new shoes, " those shoes would be tight on your feet". (i.e. the shoes bought with the national assistance money).

The countess, the widow and the little boy are all under continuous observation, plain-clothes policemen follow every one of their steps, watching them through telescopes day and night, not even making a secret of it. The widow and her son are making ends meet with difficulty. The paintings, the piano all gradually disappear from the apartment, and the little boy is dressed - as a young gentleman - with second-hand clothes received from the genteel classes. The countess wishes to bring him up to become a politician, while the mother is horrified by the thought of all public role-playing, trying to protect him from every wind and their carefully closed-up world from the fiendish outside.

These people are excluded from the world, denied admittance to the world of normal people. Not of their own right, but of that of their executed, persecuted, emigrated and dead beloved. They are the surviving relatives of the enemies of the system. The Christian name of Zsofika, as well as that of the mother and the young gentleman, could easily be supplemented by the well-known family-name of an eccentric aristocrat or a martyred Communist politician, yet this film seems to be aiming at more than the mere portrayal of a common episode of their (private)lives in a historic moment, perhaps in 1959 (well, is there one moment that cannot be considered historic?...)

What is the ultimate goal of this film, then?

First of all, it is trying to make us absolutely unsure of who can be considered normal (the excluding) and abnormal (the excluded) in this world, i.e. - of course! - the world portrayed by the film. Where does that young school-boy belong to, e.g. , who -upon extracting a promise of receiving ten cream-cakes, offers his class-mate to tell him the truth, i.e. that his father had not died in bed, but had been hanged? And while the half-orphan is digesting the news in silence by the table of the small confectionery-shop, the well-informed, pig-looking sneak is stuffing in the cakes unthawed, accompanied by looks wild and frightened. Where should we classify those secret policemen, who perform their "calling" so that their omnipresence turns them into quasi-family members, not entirely without humour? Or the nuns, who deprive the countess of the only dog in the multitude that she loves, and do it with a sanctimonious face, giggling? Or the brutal, emotionless orphanage-supervisor, who, accompanied by a policeman, breaks in upon the farm on the dawn of Christmas Day, and while hunting after the run-away child, mixes reporting with reporting on? (Reporting on is something that is done to us - the mother tells her with dignity).

Establishing a home for dogs, this, too, is rather eccentric. The excluded give away to the excluded. They create a home for dogs in a dog's life. They dress a Christmas tree for their sake, they surround them with the atmosphere of celebration. To whom could the dogs, jumping and fighting for the bones that are hanged on the Christmas tree, likened to? And who in fact are behind bars, those fighting or those who are forcibly trying to laugh at them ..?

How can one stand being excluded?

With dignity. Humour. Self-irony. Playfulness. One must play the well-known role. This is what makes the excluding world invisible. Rules observed before must be kept observed, patterns of speech and conduct that used to be customary at their traditional place in the social hierarchy must be maintained, and the site where these people happen to find themselves at just now must be turned into a home, (e.g. a porch must be imagined to the spot where draught keeps slamming the door....). And the role must even be over-played at times.

The excluded can be outside at times , then inside. Within the area of the dog-home, the little boy-young gentleman is outside while at home he is always inside. Nothing more than lines drawn in the dust isolate him from danger, life, reality, - while, as a result of his privileges, he may learn to shoot in an era when only the élite are allowed to own or use a weapon. ... The run-away orphan is inside while at the dog-home, as he is cared for, educated, given tasks to do, in one word; accepted. The excluded may also harbour hatred for each other, just because the other may happen to be inside while one is outside. The scapegoat - of course- is always the other, who else could a scapegoat be? Dispersing justice always means injustice to someone else. The excited yet innocent dog is shot dead, as he attacked a human, and as a result of his ungratefulness, the women and the little boy give up visiting the dog-home. Who knows what will happen to the rest of the dogs? (Animals are no better than humans - says the mother.. A bitter lesson.)

See. There is no way out. There is no witty, fun-poking answer to the well-meaning paternalism of the government, to its shame-faced bad conscious. Everything is absurd in an absurd world. Everything is distorted in a world of distortions.

This, I believe, is what this beautifully photographed, tasteful feature film, made with a delicate hand in the selection of methods yet with a firm hand when it comes to the direction of actors, is about. Perhaps it is a bit wanting in vigour.


Dorottya Udvaros
and Balázs Foky

100 KBytes

136 KBytes

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