Reviews

This is an excellent film, rather more than worthy, set, as the previous comment says, in post-1956 (hence post revolution) Hungary. It traces the lives of a group of kids in their last days at school, the father of one of them having fled into exile after the failure of the revolution. The kids are trying to cope with the world the revolution has left behind, and what they chiefly find helpful is western rock n'roll. They want a decadent lifestyle in a puritan state. If rebellion with a cause was no good, why not try being a rebel without a cause? Sex and drugs and the rest.

Sharp, realist, lyrical and poignant, it avoids both sentimentality and cynicism. Nor is it grandeur it is after, but the low hard nitty-gritty of adolescence in a vacuum. Top stuff, and probably the director Gothár's best.

Marvelously elusive war-time propaganda documentary that is both patriotic and mysterious. It is about the leisure activities of miners, steel-workers and cotton-mill employees, mostly musical.

The scene that annoyed the social realists at the time was the kazoo band of the millworkers, who play Rule Britannia and produce an elevated tableau of the Britannia figure with her shield and trident. It is almost André Kertész in its surrealism (Jennings was a member of the UK Surrrealist group). But the film is moving too in its trust in the people it presents, a trust tempered with strangeness, angularity and some kind of apprehension of darkness, as in the last shot of the miners descending in their cages. There is no war fever in it at all. It is almost the Blakean view of what it is to be English (I speak as a Hungarian...)

Actually I caught this movie on TV as I was about to go to bed, and

it grabbed me immediately. Sure, it's parody and genre, but it's

other things too. It is visually eye-grabbing for a start. The odd

candy colors are partly reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz and The

King and I, but the total effect is disorientating, colder, more high

pitched: its clashing colors dominated by the piercing fuschia red,

but sometimes slanting off towards yellows, or sepias and soft

blues. In European terms it's like seeing the paintings of

Pontormo and Bronzino - a Mannerist palette on film. There is, I

imagine a lot of filtering and digital enhancement here. It's

self-conscious but no more so than any consistent vision has to

be. So the color comes first.

Immediately, you are pitched in an alternative reality of westerns

(Sergio Leone mixed with Zorro) and romances, but comic as the

'western' scenes are, these are not merely 'cool' parodies. The

style everywhere refers to memory, of period, of genre: if it is irony it

is a strange poignant irony in the service of poetry. The palette

changes with the genre, as does the framing. Parts of it are

presented as scenes in theaters.

The story is simple enough but acute in its balance of belief and

distance. It makes sense as an adult take on the feel of childhood.

I thought it marvelously original, funny and alarming. Oh far far far

better than the vastly cerebral Greenaway whose work might make

a reasonable aesthetic analogy.