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Miklós
Janscó takes the romance out of Russia's Revolutionary struggle in this
simultaneously beautiful and brutal look at the civil war following the Bolshevik
coup of 1918. Set in a remote region of Central Russia in 1919, The Red and the
White follows the shifting balance of power around an abandoned monastery. The
anti-Bolshevik White Army has embarked on a campaign to completely eradicate the
area of Red Army soldiers, and scores of Hungarians, former Bolshevik prisoners
thrust into battle, are caught in the middle. The graceful camerawork and lush,
lovely landscape captured in stunning black-and-white widescreen stand in sharp
contrast to the abrupt on-the-spot executions and sadistic cat-and-mouse games
of the White Army, hiding behind a mask of politeness and civility as they line
up their next row of victims. But Janscó's portrayal of the Bolsheviks,
while decidedly more heroic, isn't much more sympathetic. The dreamlike poetry
of Janscó's cinema and the surreal atmosphere of doom carries the film
in place of a strong story or a central set of characters, but there is no mistaking
his sympathies for the victims of the struggle--peasants and prisoners and civilians
caught between collision of two armies, systematically stripped of their dignity
and their lives as the battle rages around them like an evocation of hell on Earth.
It's a brave stance for a Hungarian filmmaker working on Soviet soil in 1968 and
it makes for a powerful film. --Sean Axmaker | |
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The
gifted Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi followed her brilliant debut, My
Twentieth Century, with this ambitious but uneven second feature. Like her first
film, Magic Hunter tries to blend a range of cultural, historical, and dramatic
elements into a surprising whole in which seemingly arbitrary associations turn
out to have deep thematic connections. But this time the material is too uneven
to hold together.
Magic Hunter begins as a fairy tale told by a mother to
her frightened daughter during a World War II air raid and then shifts into the
contemporary story of Max, a police marksman (British actor Gary Kemp, dubbed
in Hungarian) who loses his nerve when he wounds an innocent hostage. He manages
to pass his annual shooting test only when a sinister colleague lends him three
magic bullets that won't fail to miss their target; to get a new supply, Max will
have to strike a deal with the devil. As
this tale of satanic temptation unfolds, Enyedi introduces a parallel story of
Christian redemption. In medieval Hungary, a painting of the Virgin Mary stirs
to life long enough to protect a frightened rabbit that is running from a trio
of hunting dogs by allowing it to hide beneath her robe. There's a wide-eyed,
gee-whiz quality to these scenes that contrasts harshly with the sly, insinuating
tone of the contemporary story. Enyedi amasses a wealth of other images, which
often depend on a charmingly primitive use of special effects, yet the film doesn't
succeed in linking them dramatically. --Dave Kehr |
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| From
the Back Cover
Daniel is hopelessly in love with Mariann, the girl next
door. But when their lives are disrupted by war, they find themselves fleeing
eachother, and their country. A razor-sharp film packed full of black humor, Daniel
Takes a Train was one of the first films to brea k the bovernmentally-imposed
silence on the 1956 Soviet invation of Hangary, a turning point in modern European
history. This beautifully shot and acted film captures, in the words of Var iety,
"the complexities and passions" of the moment. |
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