Dispatches: Karlovy Vary Film Festival - Part I

By Boyd van Hoeij

Every year in July, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival is the place to be for the Eastern European filmmaking community. Over the years the festival in the Czech spa town of the same name (better known as Carlsbad in English) has grown to become the world's most important showcase of Eastern European cinema. It has two main competitive sections: the Official Competition for international premieres and the East of the West section, in which the year's best productions from Eastern Europe vie for the top prize. Several sidebars also show Eastern European works. Boyd van Hoeij was in Carlsbad this year and highlights some of the worthwhile titles from Europe's Orient, including films by emerging talents from Russia, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria.

(30/08/06) - The Russians were out in force in the East of the West section with a total of three titles: Alexey German Jr's historical football saga Garpastum, the genre-bending Prisoners-of-War tale Polumgla and Tocka (The Spot), a sketch of the modern day Muscovite prostitution world. In the Official Competition was another Russian title: Alexander Rogozhkin's Peregon (Transit), a WWII airbase epic that could teach Pearl Harbour director Michael Bay a thing or two about the use of plot and character. With the exception of Tocka, (a vivid if clichéd portrait of down-on-their-luck — is there any other kind? — prostitutes), all films use a World War as a backdrop, though none are war films as such.

The second film by German Jr (The Last Train) is Garpastum, a sepia-tinted exercise in 1910s melancholy, takes place during WWI in St Petersburg, but its heroes, the brothers Andrey (Yevgeni Pronin, playing the brazen blond) and Nikolai (Danil Kozlovsky as the studious dark-haired sibling), are almost oblivious to the politics of their time. They are more interested in girls (Andrey), the study of medicine (Nikolai) and the supreme sport that excites both brothers and gives the film its Latin title: football. German's palette is subdued, almost bichrome (like father, like son: almost all of his father German Sr.'s films are in black and white) which leads to a style that is midway between distant and contemplative and underlines the story's kinship with the literature of the time, especially the German-language-boys-growing-up genre as represented by early Mann and works such as Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund. Chulpan Khamatova (the nurse from Good-Bye Lenin!) adds a nice touch of Isabella Rossellini's brand of weary sexiness to the proceedings as a marginally successful actress who is famous for her parties, teaches Andrey how to make love like a man and, in the end, is forced to flee the city because history has caught up with her.

Peregon and Polumgla are both set during WWII in places far away from the country's centre of power and both use the male/female balance that has been distorted because of the war as one of the major plot points. Peregon's military transit base, used by the ally US to touch down their planes from Alaska, lies in the Chukotka region, while Polumgla (literally "Fog") is a small village on the northern taiga that is forced to accommodate a group of German Prisoners of War who have to construct a radio tower to help out allied air traffic. Peregon features many warplanes but little action: it is essentially the Russian equivalent of a Robert Altman film, concentrating on a large group of characters, dipping in and out of their conversations as the war effort continues (Rogozhkin was one of the few confirmed directors that presented new work at Karlovy Vary). The historically accurate film features one of the more improbable yet true stories of WWII: the base, where most of the working population was male, was often visited by US pilots of the opposite sex: impromptu tangos are soon organised on a vacant landing strip. Thankfully, the writer-director treats this aspect rather matter-of-factly (just think what damage someone like David Zucker could have done with a similar premise), and despite his large cast Rogozhkin knows how to create full-bodied characters that we fully empathise with (a snappish military investigator with a not-so-subtle Hitler moustache is the exception that confirms the rule).

In Polumgla, the women of the village are not so easily led to dance and romance with their male visitors. The war has gutted Polumgla of its able men; only women, children and the elderly have remained behind. The worst part of their winter days is the arrival of the postman, who delivers messages from the front about the men from the village that no one wants to hear. Like Anokhin, the Russian soldier who is in charge of the prisoners (played to baby-faced perfection by Yuri Tarasov), the women are initially hostile towards the fascist dogs in their midst. The Prisoners of War are just captured soldiers, however: very hungry but not stupid. Slowly most of them enter into a silent agreement with a (potential) war widow to have their meagre diet supplemented by a few extra bites of home-cooked food in exchange for work in and around the house that has fallen behind because of the absence of men — including, in some cases, romantic chores. What makes Polumgla different is first-time director Artem Antonov's apparent ease to work within genre conventions but to switch genres as the film develops. The film starts as conventional war drama with the occasional touch of black humour, morphs into an adventure film when Anokhin and the prisoners have to trek through the snow from the nearest train station to the village in a blizzard and becomes a full-bodied and hilarious romantic comedy when the women thaw towards the German soldiers. The idyll can, of course, not last, and the film goes out with a bang of reality that hits home hard. Antonov is certainly a director to watch.

The East of the West section contained only one Hungarian film, the exhilarating sport drama Fehér tenyér (White Palms), with two more Hungarian films playing in sidebars: the tragicomedy Friss levegö (Fresh Air) from newcomer Àgnes Kocsis and György Pálfi's masterful second film Taxidermia. These three films were part of the Cannes line-up earlier this year. The latter two films could not be more different: Friss levegö is a minimalist tale with an austere story structure stretched to almost two hours, while Taxidermia is the type of film that wants to say everything about everything in the space of ninety minutes. More significantly, it succeeds in doing so — and then some.

Friss levegö, as noted by Eddie Cockrell in his Variety review, is a decidedly Kaurismäkian affair, as Kocsis mixes off-beat humour with marginal characters with a heart who learn the truths of life the hard way but remain good humoured (or at least not severely depressed) throughout their trials. The title refers to the job of Angéla (Izabella Hegyi): she is a toilet lady in the subway and is obsessed with canned fresh air. She lives with her teenage daughter Viola (newcomer Júlia Nyakó, a natural), who still thinks her mother stinks despite the large collection of air fresheners Angéla uses at work: Viola always feels the need to open all the windows when her mother returns home. The daughter studies fashion design and at one point is so desperate she tries to hitchhike to Italy to study with the big names in couture. As such stories of mothers and daughters go, she will not get very far; also because she is needed for the devastating third act in which mother and daughter will get closer to one another than they would have imagined possible.

Taxidermia is György Pálfi's second film, the director of Hukkle, a gentle film that involves murder and hiccups. If that film coasted on its occasional off-beat humour, leisurely pace and sense of countryside simplicity (things shared with Friss levegö, though the countryside is substituted by an anonymous city high-rise), then Pálfi's Taxidermia is a frantic orgy of human activity taking place inside the human body as well as its surroundings. It pulsates, swallows, digests, infects, regurgitates and spits out in a continuous battle for survival that is as savage as anything in the animal kingdom. Though the film includes scenes of vaginal penetration, beheadings, slaughter and other such niceties, Pálfi's film never feels as an attempt to shock or create something expressly off-putting or artistically gutsy. It is a tribute to Pálfi's considerable talents that the film is compulsively watchable, despite (or perhaps because of) the litres of semen, vomit and blood that embody its triptych structure. Taxidermia is such a stuffed, baroque work of art that multiple readings of its contents are possible, but its focus on bodily fluids and the primal urges of man are an obvious entry into the story. Following three generations of men, it focuses on the three male primal urges: sex, food and bodily health and -prowess. Pálfi finds both horror and beauty in the smelly, chaotic mess of life, which is exactly what great artists do. Taxidermia is probably the most original work of cinema that screened at Karlovy Vary: a film that shines with visual inventiveness and has a narrative rigour and assuredness that few other directors (and certainly not novice filmmakers) are able to bring to their work.

That Hungary is a breeding ground for new talent willing to experiment is also evident in the sports drama Fehér tenyér (White Palms), the third film by Szabolcs Hajdu. Largely autobiographical (mixing his own story and that of his brother Zoltan for the main character), Fehér tenyér traces the life of professional gymnast Dongo (played by Zoltan Hajdu) from the endless and often painful practices as a small boy in communist Hungary to his experience as a trainer in Canada with the moody local talent Kyle (played by Olympic medallist Kyle Shewfelt). Rather than following a traditional hard-work-pays-off narrative that chronicles the life of an athlete as seen through the Hollywood prism, Hajdu chose several key moments in the life of the character and followed these almost simultaneously. This nifty storytelling device allows a slow crescendo of narrative force that becomes so unbearable towards the end that a final cool-down coda is needed to round off the film. Though Hajdu never really gets to the bottom of the relationship between Dongo and Kyle (it feels as though there is a lot more brewing under the surface than the audience is allowed to know), the film is a striking portrait of a professional sportsman as well as a telling look at North American society as experienced by someone from Europe and more particularly someone who grew up 'behind' the iron curtain.

Boyd van Hoeij is the editor of European-films.net. Please see links provided to visit the site. Part II of the article will be published next week, on Friday 08/09.