Finno-Ugricism
19 04 2008has been the flavour of the evening. ‘Leningrad cowboys go America‘ and now ‘Taxidermia‘. Oh and goulash for dinner from the Polish shop (does that count?).
The diary of a disenfranchised bookseller
Just about anything that enters my head.
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Good lord. What is that Hungarian film? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything Hungarian bar gay porn on in the background in the odd Berlin bar.
I wonder if Kaurismäki is too drunk to make any new films. Haven’t heard of anything for an age.
Only “Lights in the dusk” in 2006 - and he has been protesting against Bush, the war and the treatment of Kiarostami at various film festivals.
“Taxidermia” proved very hard to watch - in fact I gave up after about 20 minutes as i was tired, it was in Hungarian and it made no sense at all. This is the synopsis from their own website:
“Three stories. Three ages. Three men. Grandfather, father, son. One is an orderly, one is a leading sportsman, and one is a master taxidermist. One desires love, the other success, and the third immortality.
The grandfather lives in his fantasies and on cold winter evenings he warms up his freezing little shed with his feverish dreams. Nothing can stop his fertile imagination.
Th father stuffs himself. For four years he was the first in his section in the Confectionary Industry. He is still unbeatable in chocolate wafers with an individual record of 2.98 (just as a comparison Igor Vostongonoff was the European champion in Sophia with 3.21.).
The son stuffs animals. He was born one and a half kilos. Now he has less than one and a half minutes left. He goes in for something that nobody has ever imagined before.”
It will no doubt be repeated, so I shall try and watch it then. Have you not seen “Kontroll” - it is deliciously dark and surreal and set in the Budapest metro.
Is that Kontroll good, then? I’d worried it looked a bit wank, but will go for it if I have your recommendation. Though god knows where I’ll find it in Berlin. (Not true, actually. Should be easily findable. Just felt like a Sunday whinge.)
I thought it was very good. Certainly more accessible than Tarr (very long and very arty) or Jancso (politically charged but very interesting visually). Makk’s romcoms/oblique political commentaries set in Budapest are quite delightful in a kind of Kieslowski way.