Szabolcs Hajdu's second full-length feature film can be interpreted also on the basis of the female name featured in its title as a minimalist game, the colourful solution facilitated by repetition of an earth-bound reality, represented by painfully simple, deep vowels: Ta-ma-ra.

If the title of a film consists of nothing more than the first name of a woman, three basic approaches present themselves concerning the nature of the protagonist. First of course it is the heroines of great opuses, heads bearing crowns and faces of other famous historical figures that arise as, for instance, in the case of Sissi (Ernst Marischka, 1955), Evita (Alan Parker, 1996), Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998), Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002) or even Cleopatra (Cecil B. De Mille, 1934; Joseph L. Mankewicz, 1963). These women can hold their own in the title of a film even without Roman numerals or various adjectives: the greatness of their lives has raised their names beyond their personalities to cultural icons. Secondly – and this option is becoming more and more frequent – the name featured in the title alludes to directness: our heroine is the girl next-door, our colleague’s niece, the sad-eyed girl from the quieter corner of the coffee house. Though part of our everyday life, she’s of a special nature – remembering her name is enough to imprint her character forever on our minds. Good examples of such titles are Amos Kollek's three films (Sue, 1997; Fiona, 1998; Bridget, 2002), the story of Buñuel's two unfortunate characters (Viridiana, 1961; Tristana, 1970), the sad life of Polanski's heroine (Tess, 1979) or Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) that proves that the femme fatale is in fact the victim of her own fate. The third path leading to the heroine of the title is mystery: there are numerous examples in the history of film of the heroine not appearing on the scene, recalled only by the accounts of other characters. She may resurrect from the dead or simply make someone else play her part. Hitchcock's first American film, Rebecca (1940), Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) and Billy Wilder's penultimate film, Fedora (1977) all serve as examples for this option. It is only Rebecca's ghost that haunts Max de Winter's ancient palace, Laura – thought of as dead – comes to life in the middle of the film only to make the private detective investigating the case fall in love with her, while Fedora – similarly to the heroine of Wilder's earlier work, Sunset Boulevard – is unable to accept the passage of time and thus disguises her own daughter as an imposing diva.

Ta,

How could Tamara (Orsolya Török-Illyés) have earned her one-man, regal place in the title of Hajdu's film? Is she a historical figure, a usual girl from the crowd or a genius impostor? The first option can immediately be excluded, as Tamara is not a historical film adaptation. Further conclusions, however, give us much trouble. For Szabolcs Hajdu's film is a love story not only whose plot, but whose whole structure is lined up to map out the functioning of love – that is, the studying of every single aspect of the film is in fact the studying of the nature of love. The figure of Tamara cannot be pigeonholed into any of the aforementioned categories because she is not only a member of this four-man story, but also plays Mystery with a capital „M” and as such beyond her primary physical qualities – characteristic of the others as well – is also in possession of „inter-psychic” traits that affect everyone. An everyday girl, who, on entering the circle of a family of artists living on a farm, functions as an almost indecipherable creature, bringing, taking, usurping and insinuating love – until she herself falls in love too.

Ma,

A memorable sequence of Woody Allen’s classic, Hannah and Sisters, is the one in which the subjective camera, accompanied by a narrative, watches from Mickey Sachs’ point of view overweight people running beside the well-known metal fence on Manhattan Island. A question aimed at the point of life is raised to be presently followed by the answer offering quiet consolation: only love can help. Demeter Játékos photographer (Domokos Szabó), dominant male of the colourful farm where Tamara is set, doesn’t even get as far as raising the question at the beginning of the story. Instead, he chooses to wallow in the depths of a creative crisis, expecting his clothes to adhere spontaneously to his body. It’s not love that Demeter desires – his complexly structured coils of brain would probably be unable to cope with the tasks of being in love. What he’s waiting for is a change, a disruption penetrating his grey matter, rearranging his brain into a hopefully functioning form. And this he receives in the person of Tamara. Our heroine’s primary task in a dramaturgical sense is to rouse the master of the farm from his useless state and place him in a position of superiority so that physical and emotional interactions between the characters can begin. In Demeter’s eyes Tamara’s principally a city girl - a female from the aforementioned second group – whose appearance as a result of the reversed reality model of the film (the double bed sunk in a recess in the floor, animals explaining the actions of humans who grunt at each other like animals, the upside-down world recalling the technique of old reflex cameras) is a mysterious event, an interference incomprehensible to their isolated style of life, and for this reason an enormous challenge. By means of her origins and arrival Tamara unites the qualities of the females of the second and third group and as two points in space determine a straight line and a straight line contains an infinite number of points, she counts as a universal woman in the two dimensional realm of the film.

Ra,

The arty-farm environment, created by Szabolcs Hajdu director and screenplay-writer, István Szaladják DP and Mónika Esztán production designer, and interpretable as the projection of the inhabitants’ inner world is in fact none other than a welcoming line-up plastered together of mud, stone and paint in honour of the arrival of Tamara, the universal woman. While in the case of Hajdu’s early short film, Necropolis, and first full-length feature film, Sticky Matters, it was the editor who had the characters on a string, Tamara’s visual and kinetic world evokes the playfulness presented in greater spaces in the director’s short film entitled Tinymarapagoda. The viewer arrives with the heroine as a stranger into this enchanted world whose occupants understand each other from the odd word (just like the figures of Sound Eroticism), though thanks to the subtitled double Dutch of the painted animals it is easier to make head or tail in the strange but nevertheless familiar situations. Demeter Játékos, Borbála (Ágnes Kovács), his partner for tax and life and Krisztián Játékos (Illés Nyitrai) live their everyday life in scenes reminiscent of theatrical role-plays: this is the conventional language of their family. Hajdu could have chosen housing estate style surroundings with burping and swearing, Demeter could have been a car repairman and the painted animals street urchins. This social-documentarist style however is alien to the director, who’s perfectly aware of the fact that the monotony of life can be illustrated much more effectively with playfulness and ambiguous tomfoolery than depressing close-ups showing dripping radiators. One of the greatest virtues of Tamara is that to present the creative crisis that serves as the starting point of the story the director has chosen a cinematic language and illustrative environment whose faultless functioning in itself excludes the possibility of the creator’s impotence: without hard work, boundless imagination and sufficient talent you can’t jump a dimension or create a new world. Hajdu and his playmates on the other hand are in possession of the aforementioned qualities. So much so that, having set up the absurd (a creative crisis portrayed with bubbling ideas), they are able to fill their strange, private world with play and, despite not managing to give their story a round ending, offer us an almost theatrical experience in the 75 minutes of the film.

The new generation of Hungarian film directors is not searching for a new audience or even a new genre – instead they are creating a new form of expression. György Pálfi’s Hukkle and Szabolcs Hajdu’s Tamara are both novel modes of expression, targeting a non-existent and creating a one-night audience. Similarly to Hukkle ’s fisherman, Hajdu makes catfish stew from practically nothing, lifting every ingredient from its surroundings in order to arrange well-known things in a new and unusual order and force the spectator to think playfully. Be it a head-shaving, petrol-sloshing excessively teenage style love film (Sticky Matters) or a love-insinuating farmhouse anti-idyll (Tamara) we cannot deny seeing our ten-year earlier, later or even present selves on the screen.