It’s rare that you come across cinematic genius, particularly one as perverted as this. It’s almost faultless in its wrongness. This story of three generations of the one Hungarian family is not a coming of age story, though sexuality is being awakened, yet not by an awkward pimply teenager, rather by a dirty dimwitted officer who awakens it inside a freshly slaughtered pig. And that’s just the beginning. The work of Hungarian filmmaker Gyorgy Palfi is equal parts high art, exploitation, surrealism, and fable, yet it’s gorgeously filmed with such a mischievous understanding of the cinematic language that you can’t help but be enthralled. In fact it’s just like Amelie, except there’s a little more masturbation, projectile vomiting, obese sex, animals chewing on the internal organs of humans, roosters pecking penises and the odd decapitation. Wrongness has never been this right. Despite its extremities the film is filled with these incredibly delicate nuanced moments of ordinary confusion that teeter on the edge of realism before choosing a more imaginative less restrictive path. The score, in part from Brazilian Ninja Tune artist Amon Tobin is right on the money, vicious and minimal. It’s hard to know what this is, some kind of fable, a warning about the dangers of elite sports, of the lure of stuffing dead animals, or coveting thy sergeant’s scary looking wife. It’s a portrait of a family who never really had a chance possibly due to some form of defective gene that carried through the generations. Gyorgy Palfi may not yet be household name, but you can’t make a film like this and not get noticed.
Extra Features:
Our David Stratton gets up close and personal with the man responsible for this mayhem.
Bob Baker Fish
