KONTROLL
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
THINKfilm
Grade: C
Directed by: Nimrod Antal
Written by: Nimrod Antal
Cast: Sandor Csanyi, Sandor Badar, Zoltan Mucsi, Zsolt Nagy,
Csaba Pindroch
Screened at: Dolby, NYC, 3/2/05
If, like me, you nodded off through Steven Soderbergh's
"Solaris"–in which a a man is summoned to a space station
where a crew has been acting strange--like me you are not
going to find characters to give a damn about in Nimrod Antal's
"Kontroll." "Kontroll," as we're told in the opening segment in a
portentous message from the narrator, is symbolic, and is not
meant to be a dig at the underground workers in one of
Budapest's aging bomb-shelter of a subway station.
The central character, Bulcsu (Sandor Csanyi–pardon the
absence of accent marks), is at the head of one of two rival
inspection squads, low-wage workers whose job is to collect
tickets or passes from the riders in this Hungarian transit
system. (Why they don't go for the New York-style system of
requiring people to pay before they enter the system is a
mystery. At any rate I was several times able to ride Budapest's
trolley cars without payment as one simply boards the middle of
the car and waits for a ticket-taker who always appears too lost
in the crowd to bother.)
Almost needless to say, Bulcsu and the men who are doubtless
paid a pittance for their thanksless task are like New York City
public high-school teachers. They have a job to do in
disciplining the riders but, as rent-a-cops, they do not have the
authority to collect the fines or detain riders who regularly ignore
the ticket requirement.
Adding the genre of thriller to this film about workers who are so
bored at their jobs that they have regular, daredevil contests
such as racing through a long tunnel ahead of an advancing
train with the aim of leaping onto a platform of the next station
without getting squashed. In addition a hooded killer, who may
be none other than Bulcsu's hallucation, is pushing passengers
from the platform to their deaths. Bulcsu, who is a leading
suspect because he never leaves the underground (low self
esteem?), insists that he had witnessed one of the murders and
had nothing to do with it.
Symbolically you could make several interpretations. A Marxist
take would hold that workers are alienated from their jobs,
thereby bent on self-destruction. A Platonic one would look at
Budapest's station as though it were a modern Plato's allegory
of the cave; in which Bulcsu, thinking that the world's reality is
nothing more or less than the interior of an underground
universe which one can escape–as Bulcsu may eventually do,
taking the escalator upstairs to the sun–redeemed by the love of
a woman (who dresses like a teddy bear).
But "Kontroll" is satisfying neither intellectually nor emotionally,
populated with vulgar characters, both ticket-takers and
passengers, who act like Hobbesian puppets and despite their
existential plight are too boorish to care about. The film was
purportedly the number one box office sensation in Hungary in
2003, which shows that something might have been lost in
translation.
Rated R.. 106 minutes. © 2005 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com
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