Iván Forgács In the Costumes of Romanticism

Konsztantyin Habenszkij 100 KByte	Views of a city taken from a car. No doubt, we are in Moscow. "I don't like this unprofessional, shaky camerawork" - can be heard from the auditorium. And what a wonder: the documentary identification of the scene comes to an end, and we are taken to a mysteriously enchanted castle, whose inhabitants have gathered the most beautiful crumbs of human cultures from all corners of the world and they seem to celebrate continuously their being together or they say farewell to the departing ones with ceremonies. Later it turns out that this spectacular fairyland is built on the atmosphere of the hall of residence of Moscow University. This, so far, would not be a problem. There is definitely something that calls for expression, a uniquely loose solemnity in the cultural versatility of the international educational institutions. The problem appears when it turns out that the world of the Children of the Iron God is continued in Natasha. Tamás Tóth is experimenting again with injecting realistically glittering romanticism into the working days with his ornamentally eclectic visual fantasy. However, in his first film everything was romantic: he set up his military plant and workers' torsos in an exotically depicted apocalypse and raised them to humane dimensions through some adventures. This time, on the other hand, he has to process a more versatile medium. The world of fairy tales is far from being so obvious. Dreams and reality are strongly pressed against each other, their correlation needs to be interpreted. Since there is no doubt after the exposition, we are in Moscow. And Moscow is an existing, unpredictably rolling, Mafia-infested, beautifully clumsy metropolis. The festival atmosphere of its universities is also real. So where is the point where this could be tilted into romanticising? Anywhere, as the young director's solutions suggest, provided that one finds a way. The goal is to establish an artistic space, which allows the continuous interaction of spiritual and material movements to be lived through. However, the different ways of romanticising strengthen the walls between the individual mediums even further. The City described in a naturalistic way, beyond the exoticism of its being an urban wasteland, is insulated from the working days through events and underworld motives (shooting). The hall of residence, on the other hand, is made into a fairyland through a consciously decorative world of visions. Everyone creates a costume for oneself from the elements of universal culture he/she considers important, they intend to express where they come from and where they are going through their clothes, make-up and hair style. This is unquestionably the most interesting idea of the film. And, unfortunately, the most controversial one, as well, since it does not get the necessary interpreting emphases within the composition as a whole, it loses out on its influence and becomes definitely disturbing at places, touching the borders of mannerism. This stylishly brotherly living together is a little sugary. In my opinion the charm of residence halls lies just in the way everybody tries to dissolve in the mediating culture (this case in Russian dubbed into Hungarian) while unconsciously retaining his/her own cultural identity. The intellectual colourfulness described in the film appears in a much more exciting way in reality, though, irrespective of this, the intensification of the phenomenon into a vision can have a function. The farewell scenes for example are really beautiful. However, the stylisation retained to the very end cannot prove successful this time, since this multicoloured hall of residence, together with the city, merely provides the background of the truly romantic line of the film. Although Ferenc, a student of linguistics, the Hungarian hero of the story, lives together with the black Puskin, a poet of Moorish origin who admires the Russian poet, and with the Polish Janus who proudly wears the uniform of the national army, although the Japanese Madam Butterfly offers herself to him, and a stray bullet hits him on the shoulder in the market, his romantic awareness of life only comes to fruition when he is touched by the atmosphere of the distant steppes (the original homeland?), when he meets Natasha from Siberia in the hall of residence. The mysterious girl lives together with her brother, Sergei, and her grandmother, a shaman healer. The room is full of magic herbs, minerals, mythical objects, and in the middle there is a huge tub offering healing water. The small family takes Ferenc in, and Andrei Nikolaevich, the retired Decembrist expert, the ex-suitor of the shaman grandmother is also a member of the family. The scene in which the two one-time Soviet stars, Natalia Arinbasarova and Armen Dzhigarhanyan, bathe together in the tub summarises the most beautifully and genuinely what sources the basic tone of the film feeds from and what kind of oriental experience of freedom it wants to convey. Unfortunately romanticising cannot enter a new level. The shaman-room of Natasha represents a peculiar world, but not "another world". It does not offer an alternative, it is not more elevated than the hall of residence. Therefore the intensity of the emotions arising could only be heightened through some kind of story. The love triangle emerging between Sergei, Natasha and Ferenc would perhaps suitable for this purpose... provided that Sergei was not in connection with the underworld. Not the banality of the motive is the real problem, but the fact that this way the romanticised world goes back to the exotic naturalism of Moscow. The dramaturgy stimulates the interlacing of three mediums (the City, the hall of residence and Natasha's room), whereas the character of the visual stylisation requires the isolation of these mediums (although it cannot really happen within the hall of residence). Therefore the relationship of the mediums is blurred to the very end, it does not become clear whether they should be interpreted against each other or strengthening each other, in other words, whether they jointly form a romantic space against today's working days, or they rebel against each other and only one of them represents some kind of ideal world. This incoherence drifts the film towards the chaos of unenjoyability. Fortunately, the director's talent and the artisticism of the world of visions saves the film from being a complete failure. I understand Tamás Tóth for making every effort to find the modern ways of romanticism. This direction, however, hides several clearly seen traps and it would be unwise not to avoid them with the help of producers and playwrights in the future.
Szvetlana Kolenda 82 KByte
Tamás Tóth: Natasha 124 KByte