Thursday, June 16, 2005

 
Kontroll

Like Travis Bickle's trash-and-hooker-strewn streets of "Taxi Driver," the Budapest subway system -- the setting of "Kontroll" -- presents itself as a kind of hell on earth. Or perhaps more aptly, a transactional purgatory, where people are always coming and going but nobody stays around for very long. The hero of "Kontroll," (or again, more accurately, the anti-hero, for his is a decidedly tarnished brand of valor) the world-weary Bulcsu, literally lives down here. By day, he leads a team of rag-tag subway-system inspectors who roam the platforms and cars fining riders who can't be bothered to pay for a subway ticket. And each night, after the trains have stopped running, the lights extinguished, he crumples up against a stainless-steel column and drifts off to sleep.

Very little of this registers during the film's first act: "Kontroll" starts off perfectly content to be a low-fi Hungarian "Reservoir Dogs," complete with visual and verbal homage, Bulcsu's motley crew almost mimicking Harvey Keitel and company's every move. In the first thirty minutes, we learn just how gritty a place the Budapest subway can be and are introduced to a bizarre cast of ancillary characters: a shaving-cream-spraying prankster, a pimp and his cluster of cheap prostitutes, and a mysterious hooded stranger who appears from nowhere whenever the platform lights flicker, pushing passengers to their death into the tracks of oncoming trains.

But as the film continues, "Kontroll" evolves from crime-noir comedy into a fascinating character study set within a surreal tone poem, a meditation on good and evil besides. Bulcsu, as we later find out, had another life -- a distinguished professional existence -- upstairs before he self-exiled himself underground. At one point, a girl wearing an overstuffed teddy-bear outfit asks him: "who are you hiding from?" and we only have to see Bulcsu's eyes to know that he's hiding from himself.

Hiding and running. In a competitive pastime called "Railing," Bulcsu races a coworker down the train tracks from one station to the next, the midnight express threateningly bearing down from behind. One gets the sense that Bulcsu is trying to outrun the earthbound, dreary part of himself in hopes that his spiritually radiant half will miraculously separate, pull ahead, and leave the dark laggard behind to get consumed by the oncoming train. Whether he finally succeeds is an exercise left to the viewer and the imagination.

Then there is the magnificent spectacle that is Bela, a fifty-something train operator constantly under the influence of cheap Hungarian cigarettes and the contents of a hip flask. Like everything and everyone else in the first act, he seems like just so much set dressing, but in time transmutes into one of the film's central characters, a fallen angel casting warmth everywhere he goes, from his candlelit traincab-turned-cloister to an idle subway car-cum-dining-room. Bela is Bulcsu's one true confidante in the underground inferno, a fellow soul exiled from above after a minor train collision mishap.

Both Bela and Bulcsu are soulmates in that they're constantly out of things, interfacing with the real world only to the extent necessary for survival. Bulcsu carries a Brando-esque air of detachment about him, Bela his absentminded professor. Neither are at home here; they're just beating time until a good reason comes along for doing something bigger and better. The glory of their subway gig is that it demands nothing more of them than mere survival -- not perfection or brilliance or competitive agility. Just existence: raw, basic and unpeaceful.

"Kontroll" has a Pure Analog look, which is to say it is one of a diminishing breed of film bypassing the digital intermediate process of special effects and color-correction. It was shot on a new, fast and virtually grainless stock from Kodak that afforded available-light photography in the dingy fluorescent and floodlit annals of the Budapest underground and processed in the photochemical domain at Kodak's relatively new Hungary Cinelabs, opened in 2002. The result is an image that is at once richly organic, authentic, and darkly beautiful. While its budget was around $800,000, the picture has the production value of the kind of film Hollywood routinely manufactures for fifty million.

And the music. Who could forget the dirtied, gritty techno-landscape forged by Neo? There's a particular theme of Bulscu's loneliness moodily intoned by a lone trumpet over glitch-beep that will twist an emotional dagger in your heart.

I'm under the impression that there were roughly ten or twelve English-language prints of this film struck for US distribution: currently, "Kontroll" plays in about just as many screens stateside. If I could afford it, I would fly all my friends to the nearest one to see this film. And I find myself working through schemes for the San Diego print to get "misplaced" by the courier this Thursday evening on its way to the airport.

Not to be missed on the big screen. It's just too overwhelmingly cinematic to fit into a twenty-seven inch Trinitron.

**** (out of four)

posted 9:54 PM