Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 2.

There's a lot of Aki Kaurismäki in The Investigator, by Attila Gigor, a new Hungarian film in the competition in Karlovy Vary about Tibor, a pathologist who makes a deal with the devil to raise the money to care for his mother who is languishing towards a slow death from bone marrow cancer in the hospital where he works. Besides the rhythms of Hungarian, which sound a lot like those of Finnish, there is a deadpan darkness to The Investigator which makes you laugh at the worst of situations. If humor is based on pain, the best thing you can say about the characters in this film is that most of them are no longer feeling any pain, or anything else. You might call the genre deadpan bedpan.

Tibor (Szolt Anger) is a large humorless bald man who has trouble with intimacy, although his calling in life involves opening bodies and determining how the dead people in his care died. When he himself kills, he finds out too late that the person killed has a special relationship to him - then a drama of revenge begins.

The Investigator builds on the kind of tactility that was heaped into Taxidermia, another recent Hungarian exercise in bodies turned inside out. Here the conceit is the body, in all its drippy physicality, contrasted with the mind that sets plots into motion or prevents two bodies - Tibor and the woman who you think will be his love interest - from pressing against each other. I won't give too much away.

The crowd at Karlovy Vary loved the darkness of the humor, seen from the perspective of the deadpan misfit. It's fun, if you don't think too much about so much effort and talent going into a story that's supposed to make you squirm. (But think of all the talent that went into ambulance humor in Mother, Jugs and Speed.) And it's a step up in its Hungarian morgue humor from the recent gore-thriller Pathology, which I reviewed for Screen after seeing it in an empty theater in April on the day it opened because its distributor lacked the guts to have a single press screening. Even the janitor who was the only other person in the theater with me walked out. Perhaps they knew what they had on their hands in the 21-styled gore story about dream team high achievers in forensic medicine who conspire to kill people and then challenge each other to explain the deaths scientifically. Pathology seems to have closed quickly this spring, although I admit I didn't monitor its free-fall. For all the humor in The Investigator, I can't imagine it playing in too many places outside Hungary.

Captive by Alexei Uchitel takes us to the Chechen war, a conflict that is all but forgotten by the western media. Believe it or not, there is even a Grozny Film Festival, and this film was invited, but its producer chose not to go.

Two soldiers take a Chechen fighter prisoner, which means they can either kill him or travel back to Russian lines, risking their lives and his. (In the real war, most prisoners don't survive to turn that experience into a movie.) In the rugged terrain - the film was shot in Crimea, not in Chechnya - not much of a relationship develops, although the trio survives from one close call of being swept away in a mountain stream to another encounter with an enemy sniper. Rather than give away the ending, let's remember that prisoners in this conflict were (and are) abused horribly by both sides, and dignity was (and is) the exception. (See some of the footage shot of the treatment of Chechen prisoners and testimony about their confinement in the documentary Letter to Anna).

Captive keeps its focus tight on the two Russian soldiers, concentrating on the psychological weight of being a captor and fleeing the enemy. As the soldiers anguish, their Chechen captive is mute and stoic, fitting some of the cultural stereotypes that you might expect from such a film. There's not too much Stockholm Syndrome here, and the worst prejudices about Chechen barbarism never emerge, although some are certainly suggested in a scene where Chechen boys torture a wounded Russian prisoner. The corruption of the two soldiers' Russian commanding officer is made clear at the top of the film. The Hollywood studios should be all over this one for its remake potential, set in Afghanistan. But don't hold your breath.

Pictures of the Old World by Dušan Hanák, was banned in Czechoslovakia after Hanák finished it in 1972. Hanák's respectful encounters with old people in rural Slovakia, from which all the youth seems to have fled, is a kind of cinematic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the collaboration between the writer James Agee and the photographer Walker Evens which examined the lives of poor white families in rural Alabama during the Great Depression. The people whom Hanák meets seem to have known nothing but poverty in their lives.

Beginning with still photographs by Martin Martincek of men and women living subsistence lives with no one to care for them, Hanák lets his subjects speak, and they talk of work, family, drink, sex, and all sorts of other things that fill up a life. A soundtrack from Handel, which seems over the top now, pumps "importance" into your observation of their everyday activities, in the way that Pier Paolo Pasolini used Bach as a dramatic accompaniment in Accatone, his first feature, about a handsome petty criminal in Sicily. The filmmakers can be forgiven for overdoing it. They seem to be trying to use the music to pry you away from your predispositions to ignore the kind of people on the screen or to react to them in predictable ways.

The communist government seems as absent as everything else is from their quiet communities. This is just four years after the suppression of Dubcek's experiment with the reform of Czech communism; the clampdown became harsher in the years afterward, thanks to support from the Soviet comrades. You'd never know it here. Nor does anyone talk about politics, although one or two men remember military service, including one who, at 94, sends greetings in French to a child that he fathered in France while a soldier in World War I.

Why ban it? These self-reliant souls had no belief in progress, and the New Communist Man, wherever he was, was not anywhere near the villages where he was needed most. The testimony from these workers who now lived in a failed workers' state showed that poverty was alive and well in Czechoslovakia, and that none of these men and women who had lived impoverished lives ever expected there to be anything different. It was reassuring to hear applause from the young audience in Karlovy Vary, although the room in an old spa where I saw it was far from full.

At last week's ArtFilm festival Trenčianske Teplice, film students were given a week to shoot and edit interviews on the model of Hanák's film. The results were surprisingly good, given the time constraints, although time and technology have made it difficult for anyone to be as isolated from the rest of the world as the villagers whom Hanák interviewed for his film. Shooting on video made it hard to get anywhere near the look that Hanák achieved, but it is encouraging to see film students looking to Dusan Hanak for inspiration, rather than to Michel Gondry.

-David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at July 11, 2008 4:32 AM