To my utmost surprise, I hardly managed to get a ticket for Zsiguli Sunday evening, an enthusiastic full crowd snickered through the 80 minutes with abandon. It happened that a few laughed even before the pun just like when kids adjust their mimicry to the promised joy. The pure presence of András Szőke was a bliss for those awaiting him; had he been chewing gum for 80 minutes in front of the camera, his fans would be provided with the same unencumbered pleasure. With some malice, I could say that he has been chewing gum in the same posture for over 10 years, but this would be unfair to the many filmic and social merits of the director, which meant particularly lot to audiences in Hungary in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, referring to a clientele wider than a fan club enumerating a few hundred infatuated viewers, part of which I had the chance to meet now.
Zsiguli – sub-caption: The complete files of the Melon investigation – the story of unfolding a crime. There is actually no Zsiguli (the 1968 Soviet copy of a Fiat) in the film, we might admit that with a certain touch of nostalgia, the title aims to condense the provincialism of the subject period in this emblematic auto make, which has not role whatsoever in the development of the story. The events recalled in the testimonies are connected through the scenes of interrogations by two police officers Enduro (József Szarvas) and Ric (Tibor Gazdag). Piroska, the interrogator (Anna Györgyi) is so bored by the Melon case, that she is unable to block her senses and although she is the concubine of the chief (Sándor Gáspár), the subordinates, sooner or later, also end up in her bed.
An ideal frame from a crime story or even a small-time crime story parody, if András Szőke had considered it seriously to shoot a different kind of film then before, or would really like to „unwind” some case. But he does not want to, the investigation is a mere excuse for linking scenes otherwise loosely related to one another, with a particular view to improvisation flows still working the best, for parading numerous comic characters: interrogated goofs, staff sergeant Badár hanging about them, a nymphomaniac investigator, a neurotic investigator – Kálmán, a transvestite mobster (?) Mrs. Csaba Horváth, Mary (played by Gábor Zelei), also known in the underworld as Rigour.
Szőke’s one-man-shows intended as the main source of humour would form a more integral part of an „unframed” film, however, his narrator role is thus disembodied from the film. There is nothing particularly wrong with his narrator role, yet he created the frame – within which it is not effective enough – for himself through the investigation story (or story imitation). It seems to be a more tailor-made task for András Szőke when he does not even have to create the façade of the existence of a story: then he is free, then he can let himself loose, then he is at his best, then he does not fulfil a task. His presence as an external narrator, as an all-reflecting and wiseacre scholar is sometimes particularly forced, even if he intended it as a self-parody mixed with parody. His method is to appear on the most unexpected occasions without any regularity, such as in the bed-scene with Piroska and Kálmán. This part begins rather well, with a typical Szőke-type absurd solution: the moment in which his dark figure is seen as an uninvited guest in the bedroom for two, can be regarded as promising until he pours the theories of Freud and Jung onto us absolutely unnecessarily. And when Wagner’s name is mentioned to satirise but also to exploit the primitive mechanism of association, the scholar Szőke appears in the company of a gramophone as a visual aid, and as in the TV-ad of Hungarian directory inquiries, he states his availability with his knowledge at any time. Of course, it is not the viewer’s inflexibility making me regard such outward comments from the film as unnecessary, but simply the dé javu feeling of „haven’t I seen this before?” Not necessarily in one of Szőke’s films, but it is all the same whether repetition or self-repetition dilutes its effect. And by the end of the film, instead of getting into the investigation, we even forget the framework story, and it is apparent that Szőke would also like to forget about it so he could freely do whatever occurs to him, and would love to compile his film from such outward comments; it turns out that the Melon case was named after the pistols hidden in melons, and this could unveil someone or something, but we have long forgotten what.
Zsiguli is András Szőke’s most expensive film to date, touched by this opportunity, he must have not been confident in a friendly horsing around be sufficient for an evening. There are also other elements indicating such diligence as the deployment of professional actors. Their presentation seems to be an indemnification for something achieved by Szőke’s prior films through their originality. What was left to visual aids (peculiar sets, colours or editing) or the inherent absurdity of a scene before has now been levied on roles outlined more strongly: the characters of Piroska and Kálmán are straightforward, though grotesque, which is nevertheless useful from the perspective of conventional dramaturgy but such categories are not applicable, thus the roles lose their charm attributable to their very unexplainedness before. In the spirit of diligence, we might seem a surprisingly grandiose stunt scene as well.
However, the creators might have felt that this was not enough and that they had to produce a few catching names like in popular films, upon hearing of which, viewers not socialised on Szőke’s films would also drop by cinemas. In a clandestine manner of featuring celebrities, they do not appear on screen for longer than a flash, yet absolutely indispensable walking-on parts must have been given to Kokó the boxer, András Hajós the TV-showman, Gabriella Jakupcsek the host of a TV-quiz, Fábry the Hungarian Jay Leno, Demjén and Tamás Somló the musicians of the great generation. Of course, it is not certain that e.g. Gabriella Jakupcsek would have a more extensive warranty, but then the question occurs to one whether she has this warranty at all. Fábry’s highlighting may have been an attempt to approach the audience of his show, and though he is not less authentic in this genre a bit than any other member of the crew with a shared history, this does not mean that his featuring for his own sake would add anything to the film. The creative devices of once fruit-bearing Hungarian amateur film conquering our hearts have become shallow clichés forced until self-repetition: that is why their own worn characters were attempted to be supplemented by new faces of the same stamp, yet they are insufficient to patch the gaps in the story (but since we are not story fetishists, and we do not see the root of problems in the lack of a story), in the message (sic?) in the first place. Anyway, everything was left unchanged around the presumed stars: the never-tiring police officer characters, the locations, the background – a police station bureau, a pub, drunk and poor Hungarians. I would not know that such weary symbols could still serve as sources of humour: the prefix „Soviet” in a compound word or the label „video recorder” on a box in Cyrillic letters, the police officers making out with girls on the roadside, who is caught by the police chief. Badár’s somersault down a slope is as if a prematurely terminated burlesque attempt, intended not even particularly absurd at this point but as a much more conventional pub creating no furore among an otherwise appreciative audience, only silence in suspense.
There is a certain beauty to how we love and commiserate ourselves at the same time. This comparison may seem bizarre at first, yet Jancsó’s late films are not distant from András Szőke’s world from a certain point of view: though hopeless Hungarian fate, in case of Jancsó, tends to have a more tragic tone to it even in its revival, while a more comic in Szőke’s film. Both of their methodologies are determined by improvisation and reappearing characters, by the cultic featuring of certain actors such as Kapa (Zoltán Mucsi) and Pepe (Péter Scherer) with Jancsó, and „the” Badár with Szőke – who they do not blush to regularly call by his own name in films; they are such readymade, such „Hungarian historical” figures that they wander into other films from time to time just as they are.
Speaking of this bizarre comparison, Jancsó is ahead historically, and is able to process even the present in his own way, though often with overused methods, through working together past and present, and to use our stars adequately, as a „functional set”. Speaking of creative renewal is not the least of examples either.
Mediocrity presented by standard characters, reappearing elements is indeed a phenomenon worthy of presentation on film even in our much suffered homeland, yet the terms of provincialism have changed in the meantime, and it is not certain that the same should be said in the same amount and the same manner as ten years ago. We should not view all from the playground in Taliándörögd (main location of a summer festival by Lake Balaton), we should not wallow in private mythology (that also fledged into national mythology for a decade whether we face it or not), and we should not continue with the same game with eyes closed as if nothing has happened since the change of regime.
The issue, by all means, is not that the early 1990s should not be worthy of presented on film, it is indeed very much so. The period must be dealt with, of which we hardly see anything yet, it should be examined from a hundred angles, this is almost essential necessity; it would be dangerous and telling if we left out or delayed this segment of our history from the books as it happened so many times. The play of Szőke and his crew had been aligned with Hungarian reality for almost ten years, it had indeed been an adequate form of expression, which, however, lost its reference by now. It may not be claimed that their film is not about thick presence, our criticism is not only about proven and possibly excessively used methods, but about the inadequate use of devices, about discussing the past (that our presence may be referred to from the perspective of already 15 years) without the knowledge and criticism accumulated since that in the same, once refreshing style cemented by now. Such forms have become empty. It is not the so-called amateurism, which is always needed, but it has to revive from time to time. We have talking into the camera here, both in the private numbers of the narrator and in the duet of the two simpleton police officers, but this method of outward commenting has become unnecessary in a political sense, while it was never justified in a dramaturgical sense: this gesture is constrained today to saying. „listen up, we are running the show for you (and not only us)”.
If nothing else, the reason we – and not only the contemporaries of the film’s makers but also the young ones recalling the memories of their childhood in the early 1990s with joyful nostalgia ‑ as viewers insists on such worn symbols may be a lesson. Not only this genre, but also the entirety of Hungarian film was entrapped by this incomprehensible nostalgia from which it is starting to fight its way out nowadays. The demand for heart-warming and otherwise „professional” amateurism, for a „human voice” and directness has changed since then by focusing on forms more conventional from a certain point of view. Today, amidst a thematic, technical and stylistic transformation, their stationariness relegates the once important and certainly epoch-making Szőke-films into the experimental territory of student films such as Úristen@mennyország.hu (Almighty@heaven.hu).
Official web site: http://www.tiszamozi.hu/
(Translated by Zsolt Kelemen)
