Lóránt Stõhr

Feature film potentials in Hungary

159 KBytes Dollybirds meets the distributor's expectations. It has won the Film Week contest, thus making it to the cinemas before the premiere. The audience is pouring into the cinemas, the promotion campaign is on the streets. At home again, you can listen to the film's music on CD. Newspapers are buzzing with reviews, Studio '97 is also discussing details. However, it is not only our cultural life that focuses on the film: people talk about it on the bus and it is a topic of social conversations. Whether you like it or not, you have to see Dollybirds. What is the secret of this film that makes the audience - otherwise rather reserved about domestic films - now besiege box-offices?
First of all, let's have a closer look at the streets. On the posters there is knock-kneed Natália Nagy beside her block-supervisor's, i.e. Gálvölgyi's, simple-minded expression, with a stupid hair-net on his head. And all the others: Gábor Reviczky, Miklós Galla, Róbert Dolák-Saly, András Lovassy, Tamás Cseh... All in all, here we go with all the idols of today's audience, especially the younger generations. Because what can be more popular today on television than the gags of the Família Ltd. (represented here by Reviczky), the parodies of Gálvölgyi or the sour jokes of L'art pour L'art Company? We are making a musical - so let's have Tamás Cseh and "Kispál és a Borz". Tímár, however, also uses less known actors, i.e. drama students, in addition to those already acknowledged by the public. They convey youth, beauty and charm to this play. It must be a tremendous will that put all these faces together.
To have a true comedy, however, you also need material acceptable as the subject matter of laughter to the masses. In other words, you have to find a sujet which is seen similarly by a wide section of contemporary Hungarian society. The film draws from two such myths, i.e. state socialism and the sixties. "Socialist" state - complete craziness, block supervisors and informants, pioneers and controllers. It is not by accident that the game soon turns into a comedy. Just think of the films of the Czech New Wave. After its collapse, the regime is still the subject of comedies, but the form has been changed. The genre of satire has been replaced by the burlesque. Menzel, e.g., is shooting Ivan Tsonkin in the 90s. Péter Tímár is trodding the same road. In 1986, he makes his entry into the branch with an excellent and highly original caricature, i.e. Sound Eroticisme, which - no wonder - has become widely acclaimed. The story of the box-factory yet takes place against a naturalistic background; the factory employers are typical female workers of the 80s. The board of the plant, on the other hand, is strongly caricatured, and the ensuing tension turns this film into an accurate description and a satire. Dollybirds is a lot more unambiguous, its gags are sharper, yet it is so much simpler and softer than its predecessor. And what is the real point - it is PLAIN. And little is required to achieve this. Take a couple of typical and powerful enough clichés about the past regime, and serve them well. The workers who sunbathe, drink, play games of card at the plant, the "peace-loan" deducted from wages, the stuff stolen out of factories, the over-aged pioneers marching in their white shirts, red scarves and breeches are well-known to the youth of the present day, too. These phenomena are truly unbelievable and grotesque. The real difficulty lies in how to serve all this. Tímár has a good grasp on this situation. Just one example. The contradiction between the beautiful blonde girl, strolling along the street while listening to her pocket radio and the uniformed pioneer leader is sure to inspire laughter. Yet sometimes even this game seems laboured. The figure of the little pioneer descending from heaven, for example, never convinces us.
It is a unique kind of humour, nothing like a sharp sword in the hands of the director, but a soft way to bring a vanished world and its typical characters close the audience again. Tímár manages to depict his heroes so that while we laugh at them, we find ourselves in a loving relationship to them. The last scene, along with the lyrics of the song is a success because it pushes the movie experience in that direction. This film is loveable due to this intimacy, too.
The sixties - complete craziness, uproar and the felling of taboos, abatement and opposites coming closer. And its external attributes, of course, rock and roll and long hair. ('Go to the barber!') Young people then managed to create a myth which has not since lost its applicability. For its evocation, clichés, come again! High knots and swinging skirts, music and happy dancing. A few toughly clipped greetings, the adventurous story of the Mary-Lou record, and these funny times readily offer themselves for a good laughter. The film's main goal is still to create an atmosphere and to lure today's 50-year-olds into the movies for a bit of nostalgia. (By the way, nostalgia enwraps already the previous great myth, too.)
What we see, then, is a depiction of an epoch, but not a realistic one. It is an view cast behind, evoking a certain atmosphere. The pictures are fully dominated by the characters, "the masses" are strictly functional (e.g. in the form of the audience). There are no simple passers-by, no postmen in this film, and if there is a character in a picture, that is sure to carry a point. Streets and houses are empty, parks are abandoned. Also sounds are well calculated and functional, we hear no noises that would create their environment. But this is what is good about this film. With strict stylisation, with a parodistic treatment of situations, with seemingly tearing this story out of history, Tímár manages to create a specifically integrated atmosphere, in which gags go off better. A naturalistic background would only have weakened the effect. And this way the film is more honest, too.
All right, all right, we have a pretty little age-portrait, a couple of likely characters, a relatively integrated style, but one must somehow get the story-telling machine going, too, and make sitting one and a half-hours in the movie worth its while. A skinny story this film has. To sum it up: our young and not so young protagonists would like to make it to the West, and for this reason they enter for a What is Your Skill? contest, the winners of which may travel to Helsinki, to the Meeting of World Youth. And there is Attila's, Angéla's and a mysterious girl's love-triangle who sometimes writes from Canada (?). The basic story is like a hidden creek in the film, crossed by so many tiny lines that the viewer sometimes forgets about it and the need for a well-rounded tale gets lost. (In line with classic aesthetics, one may say that the portrait of an age requires a kind of epic extensivity.) For all this, we are keeping our fingers crossed, hoping that our heroes may make it to Helsinki and Attila and Angéla may unite in love. At the end, of course, as we know with Hungarian films, there is no happy ending, because the director refuses to come to a conclusion. With a film made for the general public and a simply-structured story, this is a slip-up. Because leaving the threads of the story untied makes the film neither deeper nor more open. I don' t say, the last scene is still a hit, and the film concludes with a real gag. Yet that kiss of Attila and Angéla should have been happened. Such an ending shows, - and this can be concluded from the interviews, too, - that Péter Tímár did not really dare to admit that he wanted to make a film for the general public. Like his previous films, Dollybirds is also stacked between the art movie and the "mercenary" film.
The skinny story is given more flash by the songs. Just like in Hungarian films made in the 30s, characters tend to burst out singing here, too. As a matter of course, the songs that are served to us are the hits of the 60s. A few interesting questions can be asked about this. The first problem is that this is a film made for today's young people, and they have not been brought up on Gézengúz or Susu bolondság. These evergreens may have looked rather withered perhaps already to the young of the 60s, compared to the new and heavenly rock and roll. Today, however, these indisputably Hungarian hits of old have to be shaken up a bit in order to make them sound less antique to ears accustomed to the most modern of music. It is a pity that many of the songs have not been sufficiently brushed up, for all their being badly in need for coming into new shape. I wonder whether today's youth is going to like this music, and whether the CDs will sell out soon, but I am afraid that without the film, these songs do not work even if re-orchastrated. Fortunately, neither do they need to fend for themselves (save for on the CD), because most often they are embedded into ironic contexts which turn them inside out and fill their infinitely primitive lyrics with life and humour. Sometimes a few of these songs create an effect which is not ironic, and such is the last song. Yet when the music is not really enjoyable, and ideas were apparently lacking to process it, the insert only impedes the flow of the story.
Tímár attempts to reshape the songs by today's standards by turning a few of them into "video-clips". With this method, he takes to a film-linguistically tool which is perhaps most familiar to today's young people. And this first alien, distant and vanished world suddenly becomes familiar. Everything serves this purpose, i.e. the characters known from television, the orchestration, the well-known situations, the television sound effects as well as the visual tricks.
The genre is characterised by versatile images closely following each other. Tímár is apparently masterful with clip-like cuttings, and he succeeds in assembling a few spirited masterpieces in the film. Yet the video-clip is a sly genre, and hits back on the whole of the film as a boomerang. First of all, the pace of certain scenes is so accelerated that the director cannot keep up with it and runs out of ideas. Every single cutting demands something new and exciting, and instead we often see but vacant run. With a pace dictated by clip-inserts, sections immediately following them often seem nothing but boring and slow intermezzos.
This boomerang-effect of the video-clip only sharpens the problem which is typical for all comedies. One must be able to come up with further and further gags - this is basically the number one requirement of all longer genres wishing to make laugh. Dollybirds does not refrain from using even the most vulgar of jokes, (a good example is the urinating man seen from behind), just to be able to meet these expectations. Regrettably, it does not succeed. I say regrettably, because the beginning is truly promising, and the film never "sits down" entirely. The portrayal of the preparations made for the contest, however, turns out to be rather boring, and the countless songs just make it worse. But then gags fall in shower again.
The success of the film is yet a further proof of the popularity of the genre at home. It seems that the comedy, as well as its version mixed with a bit of melodrama, (e.g. films made by Kern and Koltai) is the only popular genre with which Hungarian film-makers may expect success. It would be a real break-through in Hungarian film-making if other genres of popular entertainment got rooted too, and even more if such new genres were created. Yet while we have to wait for this to happen, one should consider the comedy, and utilise modern tools the audience loves (clip-cutting, accelerations, tricks, etc.).
And this is where the question of how one may talk about the past with today's set of expressions should be asked. Who is interested in the past, in the history of the century today, if it is not presented in an entertaining way? The trouble with most historical films screened at this year's film review was form, i.e. that their form did not meet modern expectations, and just carried the dramaturgical and visual elements well-proved in the 60s and the 70s. Péter Tímár's film succeeded in leaving this set of conventions behind. The film takes a bold step towards the audience, and refuses to talk about history with holy seriousness. With the help of visual tricks and sound effects, it appears as if only records from the sixties were put on, accompanied in turn with matching visual memories.
In Dollybirds, one looks at a completed, wrapped and sellable epoch. Yet the relationship to the present is there. Why was the contest What is Your Skill ? so interesting, and why did the country come into full excitement about Dolce Vita? Everything that came from the West once seemed wonderful. At that time one had to go abroad in order to drink a Coke while driving, to smoke real American tobacco, or, if one was a woman, to be admired by crowds of men celebrating one's beauty. Here we go again, we got what we wanted. What else is left for us now?

87 KBytes

103 KBytes

93 KBytes

159 KBytes	Dollybirds meets the distributor's expectations. It has won the Film Week contest, thus making it to the cinemas before the premiere. The audience is pouring into the cinemas, the promotion campaign is on the streets. At home again, you can listen to the film's music on CD. Newspapers are buzzing with reviews, Studio '97 is also discussing details. However, it is not only our cultural life that focuses on the film: people talk about it on the bus and it is a topic of social conversations. Whether you like it or not, you have to see Dollybirds. What is the secret of this film that makes the audience - otherwise rather reserved about domestic films - now besiege box-offices? First of all, let's have a closer look at the streets. On the posters there is knock-kneed Natália Nagy beside her block-supervisor's, i.e. Gálvölgyi's, simple-minded expression, with a stupid hair-net on his head. And all the others: Gábor Reviczky, Miklós Galla, Róbert Dolák-Saly, András Lovassy, Tamás Cseh... All in all, here we go with all the idols of today's audience, especially the younger generations. Because what can be more popular today on television than the gags of the Família Ltd. (represented here by Reviczky), the parodies of Gálvölgyi or the sour jokes of L'art pour L'art Company? We are making a musical - so let's have Tamás Cseh and "Kispál és a Borz". Tímár, however, also uses less known actors, i.e. drama students, in addition to those already acknowledged by the public. They convey youth, beauty and charm to this play. It must be a tremendous will that put all these faces together. To have a true comedy, however, you also need material acceptable as the subject matter of laughter to the masses. In other words, you have to find a sujet which is seen similarly by a wide section of contemporary Hungarian society. The film draws from two such myths, i.e. state socialism and the sixties. "Socialist" state - complete craziness, block supervisors and informants, pioneers and controllers. It is not by accident that the game soon turns into a comedy. Just think of the films of the Czech New Wave. After its collapse, the regime is still the subject of comedies, but the form has been changed. The genre of satire has been replaced by the burlesque. Menzel, e.g., is shooting Ivan Tsonkin in the 90s. Péter Tímár is trodding the same road. In 1986, he makes his entry into the branch with an excellent and highly original caricature, i.e. Sound Eroticisme, which - no wonder - has become widely acclaimed. The story of the box-factory yet takes place against a naturalistic background; the factory employers are typical female workers of the 80s. The board of the plant, on the other hand, is strongly caricatured, and the ensuing tension turns this film into an accurate description and a satire. Dollybirds is a lot more unambiguous, its gags are sharper, yet it is so much simpler and softer than its predecessor. And what is the real point - it is PLAIN. And little is required to achieve this. Take a couple of typical and powerful enough clichés about the past regime, and serve them well. The workers who sunbathe, drink, play games of card at the plant, the "peace-loan" deducted from wages, the stuff stolen out of factories, the over-aged pioneers marching in their white shirts, red scarves and breeches are well-known to the youth of the present day, too. These phenomena are truly unbelievable and grotesque. The real difficulty lies in how to serve all this. Tímár has a good grasp on this situation. Just one example. The contradiction between the beautiful blonde girl, strolling along the street while listening to her pocket radio and the uniformed pioneer leader is sure to inspire laughter. Yet sometimes even this game seems laboured. The figure of the little pioneer descending from heaven, for example, never convinces us. It is a unique kind of humour, nothing like a sharp sword in the hands of the director, but a soft way to bring a vanished world and its typical characters close the audience again. Tímár manages to depict his heroes so that while we laugh at them, we find ourselves in a loving relationship to them. The last scene, along with the lyrics of the song is a success because it pushes the movie experience in that direction. This film is loveable due to this intimacy, too. The sixties - complete craziness, uproar and the felling of taboos, abatement and opposites coming closer. And its external attributes, of course, rock and roll and long hair. ('Go to the barber!') Young people then managed to create a myth which has not since lost its applicability. For its evocation, clichés, come again! High knots and swinging skirts, music and happy dancing. A few toughly clipped greetings, the adventurous story of the Mary-Lou record, and these funny times readily offer themselves for a good laughter. The film's main goal is still to create an atmosphere and to lure today's 50-year-olds into the movies for a bit of nostalgia. (By the way, nostalgia enwraps already the previous great myth, too.) What we see, then, is a depiction of an epoch, but not a realistic one. It is an view cast behind, evoking a certain atmosphere. The pictures are fully dominated by the characters, "the masses" are strictly functional (e.g. in the form of the audience). There are no simple passers-by, no postmen in this film, and if there is a character in a picture, that is sure to carry a point. Streets and houses are empty, parks are abandoned. Also sounds are well calculated and functional, we hear no noises that would create their environment. But this is what is good about this film. With strict stylisation, with a parodistic treatment of situations, with seemingly tearing this story out of history, Tímár manages to create a specifically integrated atmosphere, in which gags go off better. A naturalistic background would only have weakened the effect. And this way the film is more honest, too. All right, all right, we have a pretty little age-portrait, a couple of likely characters, a relatively integrated style, but one must somehow get the story-telling machine going, too, and make sitting one and a half-hours in the movie worth its while. A skinny story this film has. To sum it up: our young and not so young protagonists would like to make it to the West, and for this reason they enter for a What is Your Skill? contest, the winners of which may travel to Helsinki, to the Meeting of World Youth. And there is Attila's, Angéla's and a mysterious girl's love-triangle who sometimes writes from Canada (?). The basic story is like a hidden creek in the film, crossed by so many tiny lines that the viewer sometimes forgets about it and the need for a well-rounded tale gets lost. (In line with classic aesthetics, one may say that the portrait of an age requires a kind of epic extensivity.) For all this, we are keeping our fingers crossed, hoping that our heroes may make it to Helsinki and Attila and Angéla may unite in love. At the end, of course, as we know with Hungarian films, there is no happy ending, because the director refuses to come to a conclusion. With a film made for the general public and a simply-structured story, this is a slip-up. Because leaving the threads of the story untied makes the film neither deeper nor more open. I don' t say, the last scene is still a hit, and the film concludes with a real gag. Yet that kiss of Attila and Angéla should have been happened. Such an ending shows, - and this can be concluded from the interviews, too, - that Péter Tímár did not really dare to admit that he wanted to make a film for the general public. Like his previous films, Dollybirds is also stacked between the art movie and the "mercenary" film. The skinny story is given more flash by the songs. Just like in Hungarian films made in the 30s, characters tend to burst out singing here, too. As a matter of course, the songs that are served to us are the hits of the 60s. A few interesting questions can be asked about this. The first problem is that this is a film made for today's young people, and they have not been brought up on Gézengúz or Susu bolondság. These evergreens may have looked rather withered perhaps already to the young of the 60s, compared to the new and heavenly rock and roll. Today, however, these indisputably Hungarian hits of old have to be shaken up a bit in order to make them sound less antique to ears accustomed to the most modern of music. It is a pity that many of the songs have not been sufficiently brushed up, for all their being badly in need for coming into new shape. I wonder whether today's youth is going to like this music, and whether the CDs will sell out soon, but I am afraid that without the film, these songs do not work even if re-orchastrated. Fortunately, neither do they need to fend for themselves (save for on the CD), because most often they are embedded into ironic contexts which turn them inside out and fill their infinitely primitive lyrics with life and humour. Sometimes a few of these songs create an effect which is not ironic, and such is the last song. Yet when the music is not really enjoyable, and ideas were apparently lacking to process it, the insert only impedes the flow of the story. Tímár attempts to reshape the songs by today's standards by turning a few of them into "video-clips". With this method, he takes to a film-linguistically tool which is perhaps most familiar to today's young people. And this first alien, distant and vanished world suddenly becomes familiar. Everything serves this purpose, i.e. the characters known from television, the orchestration, the well-known situations, the television sound effects as well as the visual tricks. The genre is characterised by versatile images closely following each other. Tímár is apparently masterful with clip-like cuttings, and he succeeds in assembling a few spirited masterpieces in the film. Yet the video-clip is a sly genre, and hits back on the whole of the film as a boomerang. First of all, the pace of certain scenes is so accelerated that the director cannot keep up with it and runs out of ideas. Every single cutting demands something new and exciting, and instead we often see but vacant run. With a pace dictated by clip-inserts, sections immediately following them often seem nothing but boring and slow intermezzos. This boomerang-effect of the video-clip only sharpens the problem which is typical for all comedies. One must be able to come up with further and further gags - this is basically the number one requirement of all longer genres wishing to make laugh. Dollybirds does not refrain from using even the most vulgar of jokes, (a good example is the urinating man seen from behind), just to be able to meet these expectations. Regrettably, it does not succeed. I say regrettably, because the beginning is truly promising, and the film never "sits down" entirely. The portrayal of the preparations made for the contest, however, turns out to be rather boring, and the countless songs just make it worse. But then gags fall in shower again. The success of the film is yet a further proof of the popularity of the genre at home. It seems that the comedy, as well as its version mixed with a bit of melodrama, (e.g. films made by Kern and Koltai) is the only popular genre with which Hungarian film-makers may expect success. It would be a real break-through in Hungarian film-making if other genres of popular entertainment got rooted too, and even more if such new genres were created. Yet while we have to wait for this to happen, one should consider the comedy, and utilise modern tools the audience loves (clip-cutting, accelerations, tricks, etc.). And this is where the question of how one may talk about the past with today's set of expressions should be asked. Who is interested in the past, in the history of the century today, if it is not presented in an entertaining way? The trouble with most historical films screened at this year's film review was form, i.e. that their form did not meet modern expectations, and just carried the dramaturgical and visual elements well-proved in the 60s and the 70s. Péter Tímár's film succeeded in leaving this set of conventions behind. The film takes a bold step towards the audience, and refuses to talk about history with holy seriousness. With the help of visual tricks and sound effects, it appears as if only records from the sixties were put on, accompanied in turn with matching visual memories. In Dollybirds, one looks at a completed, wrapped and sellable epoch. Yet the relationship to the present is there. Why was the contest What is Your Skill ? so interesting, and why did the country come into full excitement about Dolce Vita? Everything that came from the West once seemed wonderful. At that time one had to go abroad in order to drink a Coke while driving, to smoke real American tobacco, or, if one was a woman, to be admired by crowds of men celebrating one's beauty. Here we go again, we got what we wanted. What else is left for us now?
87 KBytes
103 KBytes
93 KBytes