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| From http://imagenes.subadictos.net/afiche/4243.jpg |
Director: György Pálfi
Screenplay: György Pálfi, Zsófia
Ruttkay, Lajos Parti Nagy
Cast: Csaba Czene, Gergely
Trócsányi, Marc Bischoff, István Gyuricza, Piroska Molnár
91 minutes
Synopsis: A cinematic triptych consisting of three
generations of men in a family. The grandfather is a sex obsessed grunt during
World War II positioned at a farm with three women and his superior officer.
The son is a competing speed eater in Soviet era Hungary vying for the affections
of a female champion for a factory and fame. The grandson is a frail, pale
taxidermist in post-Soviet modernity sick of his blob like father who decides
to use his skills for a bold, taxidermist contraption.
The 2005 and 2006 Cannes Film Festivals, reading of them as
a young lad getting into films, felt like looking into the most provocative
cinema in existence, shocking the critics who attended the festivals
continually. Violence, from A
Bittersweet Life (2005) to Wolf
Creek (2005) horrifying the audience. Sex, from the use of real oral in Battle in Heaven (2005) to full scenes
of hardcore sex in the comedic drama Shortbus
(2006). There was Princess (2006),
a potentially hypocritical Danish animation where a priest goes around killing
evil pornographers and letting his toddler niece bludgeon one's genitals to
pieces with a pipe. Then there was Taxidermia,
which went with every taboo it could have its hands on. György Pálfi's debut, Hukkle
(2002), was far and away more abstract in tone, a plot filtered through a
greater emphasis on the images and sound, but Taxidermia in adapting two short stories by Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy, with an addition by
the director himself, went as far as it could with transgressions instead. This
immediately becomes apparent when one of the first images seen is an improvised
flamethrower penis, which if anything certainly starts the film in a way few
others could top.
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Real sexual penetration, buckets of vomit, death, a foetus
being taxidermied, decay and general depiction of the corporal nature of the
human body, Taxidermia could be seen
as mere shock for shock's sake, but like other Cannes premiers as such Battle In Heaven or Antichrist (2009), there is visibly
more beneath the surface that makes them more than this. Instantly what stands
out is the grubby realism that off-sets the taboos immensely from surface shock
into a general theme of bodily transgression. Hukkle was a true original, a difficult film at first because it
immerses itself entirely into audio/visual texture - one of the most memorable
scenes for me is entirely from the perspective of a mole including the sounds
of tunnelling in the soil. While not as explicit in this direction, in favour
of the methodical tone and look of many modern world cinema films, Taxidermia shares the emphasis on the
environments the characters are depicted in. Dirt lined farm land in WWII era
Hungary to a modern day supermarket in clinical white and drained under
overbearing light fixtures, Pálfi is
materialistic in depicting life in terms of texture, in full uncensored glory.
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Compiled with taboos through its three main time frames, the
result is prevented from being trite but possesses a queasy importance. Nothing
feels tasteless, instead a macabre series of analogies where the mortal body is
exposed in full detail with the same mindset like the diagrams of a Grey's Anatomy book. Even more
fantastical content like a baby born with a pig's tail and its subsequent
chopping off are depicted as matter-of-fact, which makes the viewer squirm more
than trying to intentionally offend viewers. Politics are not openly expressed
in the film and neither are the historical timelines explicitly discussed.
Communism nor the Second World Warare openly referenced, though communism is in the
background of the second story inherently in small details like a Red Star made
up a caviar. Instead you have three portraits of men who are dictated by the
body and a specific drive dictating them in their lives.
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The grandfather is dictated by sex, isolated with only a
bathtub in the barn to sleep in and his own increasingly distant desires to
comfort himself. Rather than directly tackle Hungary during a time when it was
both invaded by Russia and Nazi Germany, it follows an isolated cog in the army
on the lowest strung, with reprieve from his monotonous life as a lowly grunt
only through constant masturbation and gristly improvisions. His desires become
more and more away from social norms, including a change in the tale of the
Little Match Stick Girl, and when desire is finally sated with another willing
person it also leads to death. His son becomes a figure of idolisation but the
use of speed eating as the crux undermines it, speed eating suggesting an
incredible decadence where food is eaten but not actually consumed as it's
regurgitated immediately after, luxuries such as pudding used as training
material for young portly kids. The son eventually is pushed out of the
competition by the changes in the environment, the bitter joke for me of the
whole segment in the reference to a fellow athlete having surgery to expand
their gullet, even the ritual of wasting food by the competitors besmirched the
same way muscle implants would in bodybuilding. With the grandson, the world is
stale and merely exists despite itself as he tries to have a life, flirting
with a girl who works at the supermarket checkout who has no interest in him
and developing his taxidermist's craft to a superior level of artistry. It
becomes too much for him, the literal weight of his father too much to bear on
his shoulders and events partially his own fault taking place, including why
keeping overweight housecats that will eat anything is a bad idea, leading to
drastic changes. [Spoiler Warning] He is the only who tries to become more than
he is through a Rube Goldberg self-taxidermy machine. However someone else
stumbles across it and takes credit for making the result the grandson's art.
[Spoiler Ends] For modern audiences when there is a sense of the post-post
modern in society still let alone in the 2000s, the final segment has great
resonance that is further enforced by the mere inkling that Hungary lives in a
post-Communist state that how profound significant for Eastern European
countries and parts of German, making one wonder if this staleness has greater
implications now for them in consumerist society.
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| From http://www.edrants.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/taxidermia.jpg |
While sadly material is lost in translation for me because
of my lack of knowledge on Hungarian history, it cannot be lost that for all
the transgressions all three pieces are depictions of individuals attempting to
find respite through the corporal flesh itself, neither morally and spiritually
guided, or by abstract concepts like bravery to ideals, but through their
desires that can be dictated by decay, rot, liquids, the sex organs and
everything that is material on themselves. It is effectively imagining Hungary
as if a living organism made from flesh and bone with all the disgraceful
anatomy and functions on full display.
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Technical Details:
Hukkle fragmented
its narrative through sound and visuals, but Taxidermia places a narrative first whilst retaining an elusiveness
of what the meaning of the three mini-plots are, mood pieces retaining the
attitude in presentation of sensory content. There are moments that are heavily
stylised, such as showing the many uses of a bathtub through a camera that
rotates through and up from the floor as if an upside-down mirror reality was
underneath the room, but these are rare instances for a sedately paced work.
The film is closer to the dramas from the same decade coming from Europe that emphasised
long takes and/or contemplative sequences of scenes. Touches of (possible) CGI
are used, all understandable uses for things that would've been difficult to
pull off. (I'm unsure whether the continuous vomit in the second part was CGI
or not, but either way it actually adds to the strange effect of it being puked
up, so casually by its speed eating characters, volatile like a garden hose
suddenly spurting briefly when moved).
György Pálfi with
the film and Hukkle does feel
different from a lot of provocative directors like a Gaspar Noe. Someone like Noe
has many things to champion in their style, but there is an interesting cross
section of these transgressive films made in the 2000s which, while they are
still being made today, really set up two camps in the last decade, between the
heavily stylised works of a Noe to
the more glacial, considered films from Catherine
Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (2004)
to a Battle In Heaven. The themes of
the films are individually different, many of which are very serious in their
messages, but this division is clear. Pálfi
seems to sit between both camps, and it's a shame he's only made a few films
and many of them aren't available in English language territories to my
knowledge. One which will be impossible to license, Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012), uses shots from other films
of actors and actresses to make a character piece of a couple, which from
seeing a trailer emphasises further that alongside an interest in the absurd in
people, Pálfi has an obsession with
how a viewer reacts to images and sounds in different ways.
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Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Grotesque/Mind Bender
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
Despite all the taboos being broken from left to right, Taxidermia is very clearheaded in what
it intends to depict. It's not the shocking content which places it on my
Abstract list but the content for it altogether. The black humour to it all and
the open absurdity of the content, which I could've easily neglected, help the
film in this and in terms of overall quality. Far from a grim, sickening series
of events onscreen, the grimness becomes humorous if one's sense of humour can
appreciate the bleakness. Some moments are so clearly comical that this is
impossible to ignore, such as a cock meeting another cock, not only evoking Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure (1929)
but also an openly silly joke whose obvious punch line is hilarious in its
crassness. The tone reveals as well how the apparently normal is just as
strange in context as the shocking content, and this is where abstractness is
apt in talking about the film.
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Personal Opinion:
The exact meaning of it all could be lost to me, but far
from merely to repulse, Taxidermia
comes off instead as what happens if Nikolai
Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) and
its depiction of human absurdity, the same dry humour here, was sewn together
to more shocking content. The most pointed issues are these characters' lives,
not the shock factor, which merely are exaggerations or explicit depictions of their emotions.
Coming back to Taxidermia after all
these years, I'm impressed by it more so because of its focused restraint.
