I grew up in a village, in a hamlet of barely six-hundred inhabitants not far from the place where Péter Gárdos’s Porcelain Doll was shot. Just like the majority of youths growing up there, I never quite understood, what one can do in V. and how our ancestors could pull through sixty-seventy years of their lives there. Gárdos Péter recounted in one of his interviews having asked one of the older characters of his film what he would do in the evenings owning neither a tv nor a radio. (I call him a lucky man.) The man would take his stool, place it in front of the door, sit on it and behold an oak in front of his house. Changes of the oak tree would engage his attention every evening. I presume that from the changes of the oak he could draw at least as important conclusions concerning the general state of the world as from disturbing news that would sporadically reach him from the outside world. Péter Nádas used to take pictures of a large oak tree in his garden for an entire year. The tree has become a tourist attraction of Gombosszeg since then. Nádas’s pursuit is alike that of the poet in Nostalgy, Tarkovsky’s film. According to the poet, one needs routine and it amounts to a sacral act to do the same thing in the same hour every day – for example light a candle. In his views, one should build his life on routine, on actions that are repeated every day. If I apply these words to Nádas’s photos, shooting them amounts to a sacral act. His volume A Death of One’s Own” containing his pictures of the tree is an attempt to get closer to heaven, to a more archaic world, where each shiver of a tree has its own meaning and where nature is more comprehensible than in cities. If it wasn’t for history, the villages where the Porcelain Doll takes place would have been ideal locations for calm contemplation. Had no dictatorship intruded upon their peace, people in the Great Plain could have lived a happy life. These settlements could have resembled the Square Round Forest we know from Ervin Lázár’s tales.

Obviously one has to be careful with grand statements. Life in the countryside is very peculiar and very few choose consciously a world so isolated of outside stimuli. Very few are able to live a life of contemplation and while gazing take note of the gaze of time on trees. Most villagers consider it a curse to have been born in a village and few can resist the temptation of the city. Cities are great tempters, they stand for all familiar temptations. Redundant desires emanate from the city to villages. Nádas’s pictures emit a feeling of how one could lead a different life. Nádas’s tree is security. A stable point in time, a starting point. Nádas is none of those people who travel to the village from the capital and believe to understand it after a few weeks of stay. Filmmakers from Pest are hardly more than tourists in the Hungarian countryside today. The only grievance I used to have with Hukkle was that the director, György Pálfi seems to be amazed with local things. One can sense his surprise at seeing a colourful bug on a torn grey sweater or a male hog being taken to inseminate a sow. Gárdos is a director characteristic of Budapest. His latest films were about men in their midlife crises. However, he approaches the countryside with immense humbleness and interest. His (as a filmmaker’s) attitude does not exhibit any traits of the – sometimes irritating – surprise and condescending attitude of visitors from the capital. The people who live in the village – and whom we see dancing, smiling, gazing, sitting and embracing their children at the end of the film – do not seem to be inferior to the great actors from Pest.

Gárdos has done a good job in choosing his characters, the majority of the great actors in Pest are either from the countryside or have the same humble attitude towards acting as the one Gárdos has towards film. Lajos Bertók, who appears in the role of the officer is one of the best Hungarian actors – if not the best one – but we can rarely see him on the big screen. (Originally Bertók was supposed to play Sándor Csányi’s role in Control. One thing is certain: he would have made Nimród Antal’s script turn into a very different film.) Sándor Csányi is very convincing in the role of Csurmándi. He makes an excellent haughty, „I’ll always make it” type of figure. (I can’t help drawing the creators’ attention to a couple of trifles: Csurmándi seems to smoke four cigarettes while talking, the cigarette is long in one moment and short in the next. The road to the village is full of car traces, although the film suggests it had been deserted for a long time. These mistakes – of which there are more than one or two in the film – will appear on howler-hunting websites later: they are not irritating, but it would have been better, had they been left out of the film.)

The Porcelain Doll is based upon three short stories by Ervin Lázár. All three centre on miracle and resurrection. In the first story, a local boy challenges a brigade of gendarmes to a sports competition and turns out to have challenged his fate: the captain shoots him. However, his grandmother works wonder: she bathes him gently and the boy spits out the steel bullets smiling. It is an uplifting miracle: the boy is saved by his grandmother’s love, by her faith in that everything is reversible, all ills are curable and her grandson cannot die so young. The second story is about those, who – in contrast to the grandmother of the first story – have already buried their dead and only have a miracle to believe in, when the Evil One arrives from town in the form of the leader of the cooperative, Csurmándi. It is a very bitter story, in which everything is poisoned and corrupted by a pointless, wasted hope. In contrast to the second, the third story is again heartening. It is not about survival, but about old age and attachment – to the land, to one’s life companion, to the circumstances, to life itself. The protagonist of the first story is a youth, while that of the last is an old couple. Only adult age (the second story) seems hopeless. In this episode villagers lose to the „Csurmándi-s”. It seems that this is the least hopeful age, when everybody loses faith in resurrection. So resurrection indeed fails to happen. Everyone has to give up the hope to see their beloved dead again in this world. At the same time, even in this episode contains a real miracle: the dead removed from their graves are intact and have not decomposed but retained their glaucousness. Their faces bear traces of life: they promise a life beyond the grave. This promise is taken away when the terrible wind from the town attacks the village. The meaning of resurrection is at best sketchy both in Gárdos’s film and the literary piece of Lázár. This resurrection does not degrade earthly life as an antecedent of afterlife. It isn’t about the virtuous – and only the virtuous – meriting resurrection as a prize for their proper behaviour on Earth. Resurrection isn’t a pawn that can be retrieved after life ends, but rather a part of a complete life. Those whose time is not yet up – like the boy in the first episode – can stay. Those, however, who have served their time, like the dead in the second story, cannot be resurrected, even if their faces show the red of life. Resurrection is not a metaphor of time, it isn’t a sheer possibility, but it is the very fundament of the locals’ faith. Their approach to miracles and the demonstrations of heavenly power is similar to the one they have to major storms: they take notice and seek shelter in their houses. The works of the literary trend called magical realism – which Ervin Lázár could be considered to be a representative of – depict worlds and lives in which there’s place for miracles but these miracles by no means play a distinguished role. In these worlds one can eat soil without getting sick, one can metamorphose into a cat and a falling Ikaros is only a small spot on the side of the picture. Spinoza writes „As men are accustomed to call Divine the knowledge which transcends human understanding, so also do they style Divine, or the work of God, anything of which the cause is not generally known: for the masses think that the power and providence of God are most clearly displayed by events that are extraordinary and contrary to the conception they have formed of Nature, especially if such events bring them any profit or convenience: they think that the clearest possible proof of god's existence is afforded when nature, as they suppose, breaks her accustomed order, and consequently they believe that those who explain or endeavour to understand phenomena or miracles through their natural causes are doing away with God and His providence. …. Nothing, then, comes to pass in nature in contravention to her universal laws, therefore she keeps a fixed and immutable order. „

This is the order whose trustee is the small village community. This order can be felt by those who behold a tree in the same hour every day, by those who steadfastly hold on to their routines and by those for whom a miracle is not a miracle of the crowd, the magic of David Copperfield, not an illusionist trick of God, but an event of the laws and order of the world. Such a miracle is similar to the ones in Lázár’s consistently constructed world. Spinoza writes …. God's nature and existence, and consequently His providence cannot be known from miracles, but .. they can all be much better perceived from the fixed and immutable order of nature.” Therefore, I dare to say that Gárdos’s Porcelain Doll is not about God or supernatural forces. It is about the immutable order of nature.

The fact that the old man and woman turn into trees like Philemon and Baucis in the (according to my opinion) most beautiful last episode of the film, derives from the order of nature and has to do with their strong attachment to each other, to their land and to life. It is a gift from their fate. God has nothing to do with it.

Gárdos does not put the fate of his characters into historic context. Although it can be inferred that the above mentioned episode takes place at the time of expulsion of the Germans, it is not certain, only a few words are uttered in German.

To my best knowledge, Ervin Lázár’s village, Rácegrespuszta is gone, the wind scorches the land where it once stood. This film remains. One of the best films of Péter Gárdos. Which allegedly motivated Ervin Lázár to write further short stories. If that’s right, it was worth it.