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One searches for seeds of the voluptuous metaphysics of Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies amid the prosaic roughness of Béla Tarr's debut. Mostly there are Ken Loach's beans refried to address Hungary's housing crisis, complete with a miserabilist credo courtesy of the overbearing patriarch (Gábor Kun): "You think life is having fun?" It isn't until Tarr tilts down from the costumed opera playing on a grainy TV screen and pans around the overlapping domestic squabbles bunched in the same tiny room that the eccentric aesthete behind the earnest reformist drops the first shoe, suggesting a gloss on kitchen-sink drama along the lines of Albee's The Zoo Story. Stevens' The More the Merrier is another unexpected linchpin—space in 1979 Budapest is a privilege, the camera stays up everybody's nostrils to ensure there's never any. Two families are crammed in the grouchy factory worker's flat, where frustration is channeled into a steady barrage of familial bickering. The lion's share of long-suffering soliloquies falls to the daughter-in-law (Lászlóné Horváth), whose monologue about the need to raise a family away from her in-laws is met with a social worker's fatigued sympathy ("We can understand, we can't help"). The depleting punchline comes when the father talks to her husband (László Horváth) about how her plight is wrecking "the family harmony." The rigorous drabness becomes crushing not only to the characters but also to the director, who drops the second shoe at the carnival with a spinning camera and a purposely nauseating pop tune ("Live gaily, trouble-free / Until birds no longer sing"). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |