Hey folks, Harry here with another in today's run of reviews sent in from the peaks of man mountains of Manhattan... that's right Sheldrake. This time he's got the skinny and the fat of a flick, I missed during this year's wonderful SXSW film fest. KONTROLL. The film was beloved by everyone I talked to that saw it at this year's fest. Sadly, I'll have to wait till a later date before catching it. Here's that scoundrel Sheldrake...
Kontroll
Hungary 2005
Directed by Nimrod Antal
OPENS APRIL 1ST IN NYC
Sheldrake here, reporting live from midtown in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art is running the previews for it’s New Directors / New Films series and I’m running way behind in the reviews. This is a great series and runs from March 23rd through April 3rd. Go to MOMA’s site (www.moma.org) and check out the schedules.
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Like I don't spend enough time in the New York City subway system. Today I saw a movie, KONTROL, about a subway even more broken and morose than the one I ride every day. New Yorkers just had the price for our monthly passes raised from $71 to $76 dollars, and yesterday, less than two weeks after the price change, the No. 6 line, the most heavily traveled line in the system, broke down for five hours. Don ‘t even ask us about the switching station and the C Line, and how easy it is to take one of these switches out. You really don’t want to know. And how long does it take to fix? How’s half a year strike you?
KONTROL is a movie about a broken life and a broken system, filmed on the world's biggest train set (thanks, Orson) which looks like nothing so much as the famously, permanently broken MTA system in New York circa 1981, but is in fact the Budapest mass transit system. Think bankrupt New York in the 1970s, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. The doors are broken, the stations hideous, the train cars covered with graffiti and run by gangs, the people fat and acne-marked and badly dressed and corrupt and mean in their hearts.
KONTROL introduces us to bleak world of the ticket taker on this train system. See, it's a subway but they try to run it like the Long Island Rail Road, or the Metro in Paris—the honor system. Forget gates, forget tokens. You get on the train, and once in a while a ticket inspector may, MAY come by to see if you’ve felt obliged to shovel out the spondulicks to pay for your ride. Now, to a New Yorker, the Honor System is what we would call a Free Ride, and so say the hoi polloi, and these characters are the hoiest of the hoi, in Budapest. Communism, besides corrupting the souls of the common man, has also shielded these gray folk from the impact of advanced, or any, turnstile technology. Suffice to say that, as depicted here, neither honor, tokens nor turnstiles have made inroads into the infrastructure of Hungarian mass transit. In a word, KONTROL battles—what else?—KAOS, and it’s a wonder that the trains run at all, much less on time.
In this dark network of tunnels and bent souls, the ticket taker is the most ineffectual of gatekeepers. The implicit social contract—we ride for free—violates the explicit demands for payment, and so the ticket takers are in perpetual daily violation of the rider’s space. The citizen class = the criminal class, and it’s hard to maintain the cheerful uplifted spirit and to look forward to putting the shoulder to the daily wheel when every time you ask for a ticket you find yourself in a fight, or argument, with the entire carload of passengers. Each ticket inspection is a complicated, failed negotiation that ends in misery, or far worse.
KONTROL’s hero is a man who used to have a good job, and now he has this job. As the movie rolls on it’s pretty clear he could leave any time he wants; that he doesn’t leave gives the movie its fabulist dreamlike quality. He’s the head of a team of losers, the worst ticket collectors in the history of ticket collectors, so you have this war movie / Stalag 17 / animal house dynamic to the action and the relationships. The eldest of them is as resolutely cheerless as any character I’ve seen in a movie lately.
The reason to see this movie is to see the dreamlike logic of being trapped in a nightmarish system worked out: think of BRAZIL set underground in dark tunnels. It’s quite a good movie (perhaps excepting the last two minutes) and has what I believe is a real innovation, born of its moment in history, its transition from one political/economic system to another.
I have to explain a little before you get the innovation. In socialist counties, you tend to get stories about little gray men lost in a huge bureaucratic system: there’s no rebellion, there’s only escape. Whereas in capitalist countries you tend to get stories about being shut out of the system: there’s a powerful liquid flow of money, and the outsiders live, literally, outside that flow. The two techniques amount to the same thing: the powerful use each system to maintain their exclusive access to resources. On the one hand you have the dilapidated government bureau and powerful bureaucrats handing out endless forms; on the other hand you have overpaid movie stars living in gated communities.
Now I can explain the innovation. KONTROL lives somewhere in the middle between these two systems, and the hero is an outsider inside a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Maybe M*A*S*H* or its misconceived and idiotic bastard child Article 99. But, as far as the innovation goes, this movie takes that idea and informs the entire world of the film with it. It’s a great achievement and will someday be shown in film courses.
I liked this movie a lot, as did my friend Maitland McDonagh, senior critic at TV Guide. For those of you who picked up the book BOOK LUST, Maitland just got handed the contract to write MOVIE LUST, and KONTROL inspired her to add “subway movies” to her list of little essays she’s writing for the thing. There’s a neat plot device in KONTROL involving a footrace with a train that pays off nicely at the end and reads as the thematic underpinning of the movie: even if you win the race against the train, you’re still the rat in the tunnel and the only right move is the transcendental one: out.
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For movie buffs, KONTROL quotes some of my favorite Hollywood movies. Look for the French Connection moment on the train platform; the Crocodile Dundee moment; the Blade Runner owl, the American Werewolf in London quote, the spinning blade of the fans from The Third Man –and it just goes on. No wonder I liked this movie, the director’s sensibility was formed by my favorites.
Something else rich and strange about this picture: the film begins in a way reminiscent of the old Cecil B. DeMille advertisements, the ones that assured us that the biblical epic we're about to see is not only true to the original story, but is based on researched historical fact. In this case, before the movie proper begins, the president of the Hungarian subway system appears on screen before the first titles appear and says to us something like, some may say we’re unfair in portraying our noble ticket takers in this way, but I believe we’re promoting a talented young man’s career, and any way he’s a personal friend of mine. Hey, socialist cronyism dies hard. Just ask Putin (which, has anyone ever noticed this, is half of Rasputin? Hmm….)
One other remark: it's not quite clear who dies at the end in the film's climatic race- I think I know who it was, and I think you'll know too. I don't think the film was improved in any way, either in tone or story, by leaving such a dangling ambiguity. But a minor point. As for the last two minutes and the dime store angel costume…you’ll rub your eyes and think you just wandered into a Really Bad Movie. But it doesn’t last long,
