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HUKKLE
7/10
Hungary
2002 : Gyorgy PALFI : 75-77 mins
No less an
eminence than Paul Thomas
Anderson is said to be a big fan of Hukkle, and it isn’t hard
to see why. This is a bold debut from the 27-year-old Palfi – experimental
but accessible, if not entirely intelligible on first viewing.
There’s no dialogue as such in the film, which thus joins the coyly dialogue-light
likes of La Libertad
and Soft For Digging
in a current mini-genre of deliberately ‘quiet’ projects – Iosseliani’s
Monday Morning is
relatively verbose variant.
Words are
spoken in Hukkle, but they remain indistinct, and the only
clear instance of audible human voices comes near the end during a choral
song. Palfi instead tells his story using sound effects – both natural
and man-made. In a small Hungarian village, an old man sits hiccoughing
(“hukkle! hukkle!”) outside his house, watching the world go by. Around
him, animals, birds, insects, fish and people go about their business,
with – as in Malick’s The Thin Red Line - no special emphasis on
one species above any other. Gradually some elements of ‘plot’ cohere
around what seems to be a homicide, but it’s hard to be too dogmatic about
what we’re seeing and hearing.
Whatever the
specifics of the story may be, there’s enormous pleasure to be had from
the refreshingly
non-anthropo-centric
mechanics of its telling: cinematographer Gergely Poharnok captures crystal-clear
images of the natural world while Tamas Zanyi’s sound creates a fully-fledged
audioscape. And Palfi, who has a fine eye for the composition of shots,
keeps things moving at anything but a snail’s pace – most of the scenes
are short, with many visual jokes involving the creatures, who emerge
as unpredictable minor characters with which we get up close and very
personal.
He doesn’t
hold back on the more brutal aspects of nature, or man’s treatment of
his fellow beings, and it’s very hard to know what to make of the end-title
disclaimer that “Contrary to appearances, animals in this film were not
harmed” when we’ve clearly seen terminal injuries inflicted on ants, a
mole, worms, bees and fish. Half wildlife documentary and half murder
mystery, Hukkle represents an unlikely but successful cross-pollination
of genres, with some flashes of genuinely freakish inspiration: including,
towards the end, a literally out-of-the-blue special-effects event that
must ranks among cinema’s most gloriously unexpected cases of deus
ex machina.
7th
March 2003
(seen on video, 1st February, De Doelen videotheque, Rotterdam
– Rotterdam
Film Festival)
For all the
reviews from the Rotterdam Film Festival click
here.
by Neil
Young
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