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PLEASANT
DAYS
6/10
Szep Napok : Kornel Mondruzco : Hungary 2002 : 100 mins
A
promising but flawed second feature from 26-year-old director Mondruzco
(who also wrote the script with Viktoria Petranyi and Sandor Szoter) Pleasant
Days starts off strongly, only to loses its way in the middle section
– but then, when it does find a new direction in the final scenes, you
end up wishing it had remained lost. The title is, of course, bitterly
(and all too predictably) ironic: the days we see unfold in a medium-sized
unindentified Hungarian town (actually Kaposvar) are anything but pleasant.
The
summer weather is warm, but, as in Austria’s Dog
Days, it’s an oppressive stifling heat – all the more so because
Hungary, just like Austria, is entirely landlocked. Claustrophobia seems
to be a pervasive national characteristic in this land which boasts one
of the world’s highest per-capita suicide rates: surly teenager Peter,
known as ‘Petike’ (Tamas Polgar), is especially fed up with his lot. Just
out of jail and with zero prospects beyond a vague idea of escaping to
the seaside, he mooches around the local launderette where his sister
Maria (Kata Weber, strikingly resembling a brunette Chloe Sevigny), works
alongside petite, pregnant blonde Maja (Orsolya Toth). Petike drifts towards
a relationship with Maja after she gives birth in the back room of the
launderette – but soon finds himself entangled in her complicated love-life…
Mondruzco
sketches Petike’s world with a close attention his actors (close-ups abound)
and to external detail: t-shirts are emblazoned with ironic slogans like
‘surf’ and ‘cute & wild.’ Props and actions are more important than
dialogue for these inarticulate, dissatisfied young people who mainly
communicate in deeply meaningful looks and stares – at one stage, Petike
takes a bath inside a washing-machine, and later wears boxing gloves in
the bath as he washes his hair. In a series of these fragmentary episodes,
Polgar seems to get right inside Petike’s head – he’s never quite sympathetic
but, with his naturally insolent set of features, he projects a compellingly
dark, brooding energy that’s engaging to watch.
 There’s
clearly a heavy reliance on improvisation involved – Mondruzco’s estimate
is two-thirds – and this makes for a believable, if occasionally awkward
vision of Hungarian youth. But it’s very difficult to make this kind of
loose improvisation stretch to feature length - it can’t be a coincidence
that, in the most successful recent example of European teen-anomie, School
Trip, director Henner Winckler demanded his young cast rigidly
adhere to their script. Pleasant Days starts running into problems
as it tries to develop a narrative around Petike, Maria, Maja and Maja’s
various other lovers: for one (fairly crucial) thing, it’s hard to keep
track of who’s who and what’s what.
The
characters’ ongoing sexual frustrations reach a startlingly violent climax,
meanwhile, that jarringly forces the audience to re-evaluate its view
of Petike. Soon after this spectacularly bleak sequence, there’s a very
sudden tragedy involving a major character that’s equally difficult to
digest. It feels as though the director and his co-scriptwriters have
lost control of their material, allowing it to veer off down arbitrarily
nightmarish paths that don’t do justice to the characters they’ve so painstakingly
developed – leaving a nasty taste in the mouth as the credits roll.
19th August 2002
(seen 15th, Filmhouse Edinburgh – Edinburgh
Film Festival)
For all the
reviews from the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival
click here.
by Neil
Young
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