The Revolution, visualized by Miklós Jancsó as political credo, pagan pageant, busy day at the fair. The vast Hungarian flatlands during the 1890s provide the stage, the camera starts out close (brown doves pressed to a maiden's bosom) then keeps its distance, constantly tracking, panning, tilting as the fable unfurls in monumental, unbroken takes. "La Marseillaise" is appropriated, violence is contemplated as an inescapable response to tyranny: The rich Count sends a bailiff to buy off the rebellious workers in his property, the peasants refuse his drink and set fire to his bribe of sacks of wheat, the bailiff is himself bagged and fed to the pyre as the revolutionaries form a daisy-chain around it. The infantry rides into the conflict, and their grey uniforms add to Jancsó's swirling canvases, in which the river literally runs scarlet and the blues of a female organizer's frock and babushka might be derived from one of Fred Astaire's suits in The Band Wagon. Indeed, the surrealism of MGM musicals is promptly recognizable (Jancsó's concentric circles offer a thorough analysis of Sidney's Annie Get Your Gun, noted later by Bertolucci in 1900), but Dovzhenko is the main cornerstone for the movie's many deaths and rebirths, falls and rises, waffling troubadours and slogging trains and talismanic close-ups of loaves of bread. The cycles of oppression and resistance lend the maypole around which the revelry spins, and, achieving the culmination of his style, Jancsó trades realism for poetic mysticism, the faith of insurrection -- a character is shot dead merely to be revived a moment later by the kiss of a maiden, whose own wound has flowered into a crimson cockade. (Venus and Adonis: "An image like thyself, all stain'd with gore.") A fertility festival gliding from ecstatic to grave and back, the picture is a steady progress towards a sublime spiritual victory. Aesthetically and politically, a film about freedom, and a free film. Screenplay by Gyula Hernádi.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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