STRACHATELLA

Three weeks after the Hungarian Film Review, when I hear in the radio and read in the papers, that the film of András Kern, Strachatella (Sztracsatella) was seen so far by many ten thousands, I only begin to feel relaxed as I gather strength to put up this review. I feel relaxed, for the vote of the audience managed to steal out the stake from this writing. To praise a successful movie is opportunist behaviour at best (we take a suck at the ice-cream), like joining the queue standing in front of the pay-boxes. To pitch into it, on the other hand is outright stupidity, for you not merely refer yourself to the ivory tower, but to the heights of demagogy as well. Otherwise, there aren't many more pleasant things than to lure the audience back, your opinion is from this point on mere words, words and words, private nuisance of the critic. I feel the responsibility as well however, since the contradictory reception of the film Sose halunk meg (We never die) by the critics is still a vivid memory in me, when director and critics produced unfortunate empty talk slipping beside one another. Then the quarter-of-a-million audience of the film responding to the belittling press reaction resulted in the re-evaluation of the film with half a year delay. The front lines were set up by that time, however, so the belatedly published laudation dictated by self-reproach did not soften prejudices substantially. It would be high time to get rid of this mutual bad feeling which throws both sides into cramps, since it only conserves the artificial separation of "popular movie" and "art movie", useless for decades, what is more, it reinforces the prejudices of the directors, who can't see anything else behind a critique slashing everything but the snobbish prejudices of the author. It would be good if those barricades had been demolished and if a director creating a successful popular movie did not have to excuse himself by crossing his hands and to defend himself by knee-jerk reaction just because of the enthusiastic reception of his/her film, and it would equally be meritable, if, some time, both praising and critical gestures could be taken as they are. If opinion and judgement stood behind a gesture and prejudices were put far in the back.

(I can foresee, there will be a graffiti at the end of the millennium: Hungarian audience, Hungarian movies, Hungarian cinemas!)

Other. I am aware, that having put down such an introduction the only elegant thing is to praise the film, otherwise nobody would clear me of the accusation, that the text above was merely a forecast explanation.

It wasn't.

To put it straight: I did not like Sztracsatella. I did not like it for the first and it did not enravish me for the second time, either. I am glad for its success, however, because so you can criticise it with good conscience (if not with pleasure, though).

The core idea of the András Kern film is, that it dissolves the dark flaring and defiant melancholy of our intellectual films of well-being by humour, taming it to be friendly and renders it consumable. The Sztracsatella is a report with self irony, on the atmosphere of a generation in their forties. It reports on a familiar medium, on the city, on a few well known characters. This in itself suffice for a well-sounding subject. Take a conductor who is in a crisis from every aspect, who doesn't feel well in his hide, in his family, at his job and living place. Who was swept away by the last few years and who fled from this into nostalgia, a kind of private mythology. And to the neurological department or the mental ward, as if to take a rest. To whom life is lukewarm, work is a pain in the ass. Who has lost his footing. (Maybe he never had one.) Who merely doesn't say with Kundera in choir: "life is somewhere else", because the scenarist (and the director and main character of the film in the same person) found a more striking slogan. Facsimile. That is, a copy. That is dullness, reflection, feeble reworking is everything here. Our accustomed places have faded out, the corner pub became Burger King, and it is only the memories which are brisk black-and-white.

What I said here, is the malicious interpretation. Though I can't even state, that the diagnosis set up by Kern would be false. And not because it is personal (you can say authorial) - therefore impossible to attack. Because it is "well-being", though this is a flexible concept and no excuse. Because it might be true, that the world around us is as dull and bleak as it is, that it is not worth of falling in love with someone, because it ends up in baking rum and shooing hens anyway, but in this case all these don't count.

No use of the good idea, the professional staff, excellent actor colleagues, personal charm and erudition. A shootable story was born, but the well developed script is missing. Though the character of the main role is tinged and Kern obviously feels convenient in this role (he can bring in his own, best practised figure), nevertheless the figure of the woman psychologist played by Eszenyi could bear some more elaboration. In addition Kern mostly leaves it to Eszenyi to play him off the scene. In order to be able to identify ourselves with the sorrow of the woman psychologist caused by the baking rum at the end of the film, it wouldn't be bad to provide a cause why she had fallen in love so suddenly with her patient who has ample amount of crisis and a fear of the end of his love life. Maybe it is the undeniable charm which sweeps the overeducated woman doctor. After all, the film is intended (if I understood correctly) to go about their relationship, their facsimile love, among others. About the few happy, uncontrolled days, which are merely intended to be depicted by a short sequence consisting of shots retouched to be wonderful like an advertisement, and syrupy, over-filtered images. (It quite strikes out from the film which is otherwise elegantly shot and properly illuminated.) Without unfolding the story remains meagre, turns of the plot are not justified. Without a real context even the accurately characterised figure of the hero might become weightless. Thus the role of the wife remains poorly outlined, to say nothing of the boy. You can feel that this thread is very important, but we cannot get any closer to neither the father, nor the son with the help of their two scenes together. Similarly, the archive images have a rather emotional charge, they don't have a function in the plot. The Sztracsatella unfortunately softens the drama and fades conflicts so successfully, that at the end the meeting points are barely sensible.

It is disturbing, how the reeling and appropriate scenes are swapped with false episodes. The dialogues of the psychoanalysis in the hospital (this is one of the most important elements of the film) are explicitly lacking credibility and fall apart, though this is exactly the place, where the direct, situation oriented past-revoking of the hero (motivations, depicting the character) and his relationship with the woman doctor should have been held together. The accurate and calculated tension of the scene in the dentist's room is ruined by the overplayed hysteria of Udvaros, while the atmosphere of the idyll in the green belt is depressed by the crowded burlesque of the police intervention which was meant to be an interlude. (I still can't grasp, what the figure of those four break-down trucks has to do in this sequence, inserted as a cut image?)

Conflict and burlesque idyll and film song, past-revocation and honouring the sponsors interchange without much edition. Myself, I navigated more and more tired among the quotes and gags, brackets and winking, placed by Kern in overwhelming abundance. Sometimes this is only disturbing, in other cases outright painful, but not necessarily comprehensible. After the discussion with the mother, where ample space was given to the problematic of the missing Hungarian popular movie, it is not really surprising, that the advertisement of the Postal Bank follows, arranged for the point of the final scene (the film, by then, has created the system of conventions, which would bear this as well.) No doubt, it is merry to laugh at everything, put the quotation marks and then back up from the situation, only to press the changed perspective between quotation marks again. This can be an entertaining solution just as much as a boring one. Or a concept, for that matter. The perpetual maintenance of the as-if experience, an honest, deliberate lack of depth. Crumpled copy of facsimile.

Where in the hell did we fuck it up, after all?