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.

Taxidermia (2006)

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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.

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.