Hukkle (2002)

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Director: György Pálfi

Screenplay: György Pálfi

[SPOILERS THROUGHOUT]

As the most prominent figure of Hukkle, its befitting one of the first images we begin with is an old man, his face a tapestry of age, hiccupping on a wooden bench outside, intercut with a geese trying to eat by sliding its head through a fence. A rickety bench, it wobbles as ants scatter underneath, as predominant as he is rather than isolated background features. Thus Hukkle, the debut of underrated director György Pálfi, begins...

We rightly celebrate the cinema of Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia had a rich heritage of great films, with Slovakia as a separate country now rightly claiming the films shot in its borders as its own, and the now Czeck Republic still creating distinct films. Poland has a legendary history as equal to it in cinema, as does Russia. Estonia is growing in interest, new film films like November (2017) creating a unique language of their own, and we know Romanian cinema well around the world. We must not forget either countries from the region with their own histories of cinema - Ukraine, Lithuania, Slovakia, Serbia and Montenegro etc. - or even a country like Bulgaria who, unfortunately, are more well known for straight-to-video films being shot there when American based locations aren't available, rather than their own cinematic heritage¹.  Hungary, the subject of today's feature, is a huge influence on this movement of Eastern European cinema, but we are in danger of forgotten sons and daughters being forgotten from the recent decades who have contributed to innovating and unique cinema.

One such figure is György Pálfi, whose reputation comes from the notorious Taxidermia (2006), a triptych of three decades of Hungarian culture which is slightly revolting. However most of his career, sadly smaller than I wish it was, is unavailable; I can understand a film like Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012) being a nightmare to release, as it creates a new film from pre-existing copyrighted material from major classics, but you also have Hukkle, film as pure audio-visual spectacle following a small Hungarian rural town. No musical score until the end credits, no dialogue in the slightest until one of the last scenes (where the plot revelation explaining everything is sung at a wedding), but entirely filled with the diegetic sounds of nature, rural life and fine culinary arts.

The plot is very simple if you piece the narrative fragments together - that the women in the village are poisoning the men with belladonna liquid provided by an elderly woman. To those who want it to remind a surprise, I'll obscure the narrative and only mention in easily readable text the fact that people (all men) are abruptly dying in the town for suspicious reasons, all whilst Pálfi shows us the natural and rural world that weaves around this scenario and human society in their own world.

It is slow, meditative cinema except that the director/writer belongs to a type of filmmaker from the 1990s but especially the 2000s who broke down art cinema into a level of unpredictability that could even win over cult film fans and, growing up in the 2000s and slowly getting interested in the reviews of these films from 2005 onwards, made these filmmakers with their more controversial films (like Taxidermia) get emphasis in mainstream British film magazines like Total Film. Beyond this however there is a greater sense with someone like Pálfi of all the tools and influences of cinema being at hand, comparable to idiosyncratic Hungarian filmmakers who came around the same time like Kornél Mundruczó, who can take a superhero origin plot with a realistic drama and make Jupiter's Moon (2017), or even Nimrod Antal, who did get lost in Hollywood but qualifies for his debut Kontroll (2004), which is a surreal murder mystery set within the Hungarian subways. The kind of film Hukkle is means Pálfi constantly shows you new layers to this world, between the contemplation of meals being made to the perspective of a mole under the soil, the creature's perspective one of many alongside countless other animals and insects we see. Then, randomly, an airplane flies close to the ground in a shot that I'm still trying to grasp, or we even see an x-ray of a character eating food, witnessing it go down the gullet with tension in a shot that does show the few moments where the CGI has dated but doesn't dampen the ambition.

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As a result, with little dialogue at all, you experience the film in sound, in the mood, in the images, but here is a whole world that gleefully amuses in crudeness as well as entices with beautiful images, men playing a game of bowls suddenly cut to an extreme close-up of a hog's bulbous wobbling testicles, belonging to a stud walked by his owner down the road to impregnate other peoples' sows. The worlds of animals is that as vivid as ours, their voices as vivid and distinct in the soundtrack between various insects (ladybird on a girl's ear buds for a music player), birds, amphibians (a frog swimming before its unfortunate demise by trout), and mammals who all pass each other occasionally but other times live outside each other and human society in its nefarious Midsomer Murders level of body count and suspense.

The story, if you are eagle eyed (or know your botany), can be pieced together with ease, and can be seen to be precisely built up, but Hukkle without any spoken dialogue doesn't speak in exposition in the slightest, instead telling this tale in the world of ordinary life between cooking, interaction, work in a sewing factory, police cars having to reverse down a road to allow farming equipment to move along, and various moments between intentional laughs and fascinating vignettes of ordinary life in human and animal life. Arguably, the film is an avant-garde production but that doesn't negate immersion, rather than forcing one's attention to abstraction filling it with details which we have a terrible tendency in mainstream cinema in negating the importance of, and how it's all captivating when spotlighted on. Certainly, for those who are easily hungry, the amount of cooking in this film is bound to have an effect on foodies, which I haven't exaggerated for comic effect.

The humour is found, a black sense of humour which is found throughout in the cutaways and tone, our hiccupping old man the one person Greek chorus who merely looks on at the world around him in peace, even having the post-end credits sequence happy in his own world. The reference to Midsomer Murders might go over the heads of my non-British readers but are poignant here; imagine a British Sunday night television drama that has lasted many seasons, always following murder mysteries within a rural community, middle class rather than Hukkle's working class, with so much murder taking place in just one episode the population would've been at negative, evoking as much Hot Fuzz (2007) without the action scenes. Hukkle would've been a detective mystery, only with a cop who seemingly has a mullet under his uniform hat, were it not the fact György Pálfi is interested in the natural ecosystem to co-exists within such a tale, and the ordinary humdrum life that would not be depicted in a show like Midsomer Murders, even the jokes like the reversing cop car shot in long shot sideways down a country road. Even the mystery is a banal one, stemming ultimately from folk culture with a dark smirk to what it is entirely about.

Helping is the Hukkle is less than eighty minutes, containing a fully fleshed out plot with this style fully felt and immersive, so it manages never to have too little or feels pointlessly padded. It proved a great start for Pálfi who, with Taxidermia as his follow up, effectively continued his obsession with Hungarian culture but definately ramped out the crass humour and even blacker humour, this offending the masses. Sadly, after that film, he's become obscure. That's an absolute shame as revisiting a film as Hukkle enforces how the innovations of Eastern European cinema were still strong into the Millennium onwards.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

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1) Not to insult straight-to-video genre films shot in Bulgaria. It just sad, how as Canada is used to represent American cities, like being forced to dress up as the metaphorical girlfriend/boyfriend unavailable and more longed after than the location used itself.