A HUNGARIAN FAIRY TALE
With David Vermes and Eszter Csakanyi.
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The tale of the scorned Soviet statue–apocryphal or not–bespeaks a wry defiance and a fierce resistance to official cant, which characterized public Hungarian attitudes long before the remarkable recent rush toward new civil liberties and political rights. Few filmmakers there, or anywhere, surpass Gazdag at the fine art of insinuating acerbic observations into seemingly “innocent” scenes of Party officials performing endless mischief through (or under cover of) strict bureaucratic procedures. In Gazdag’s work the key image evoked is not so much of evil Party stooges (though such folks do swagger in and out of the frame) as of clumsy apparatchiks tumbling over one another like Keystone Kops.
After an enforced absence Gazdag returned to filmmaking in the relatively relaxed political climate of the early 1980s with Lost Illusions (1982), which ably refashioned Balzac’s 19th-century novel to skewer a sorry band of upwardly mobile East European professionals “networking” busily on the eve of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia–a far tougher probe into that stratum than the more marketable The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Gazdag’s turf is populated with bureaucratic fools, abusive petty officials, and protagonists who (usually) try to fight their way free from the web of deceptions that make up “the official story.” Allegory also comes potently into play. So it is with A Hungarian Fairy Tale, an uneasy and highly effective mixture of realistic narrative and surrealistic odyssey. Here bureaucracy bites the dust and an orphaned boy ultimately takes wing to a never-never land of family bliss, toward the paradise that the people’s republic, except in old Party boasts, never even remotely became. Shot superbly in luminous black and white, the film is a captivating accomplishment even if the subtle allegorical (antiauthoritarian) dimension is ignored. Gazdag’s droll and stinging style is muted, the better to highlight an ambitious and nearly archetypal rendering of the quest for a sense of identity and for an unmanipulated milieu to live in. It’s hardly necessary (though it must help) to be East European to appreciate that utopian thematic thrust.
