Kontroll
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Movie Reviews of Kontroll
Movie Review: I love this film
Summary: 5 Stars
There's so much symbolism and enchantment. Sure, it's gritty, violent and quite frightening at times, but there is magic (love) above all else that makes it a worthwhile viewing.Movie Review: The Subway as the Nether World
Summary: 5 Stars
Scary, funny, charming, exotic, quirky . . . and literally perfect in many ways.
Check it out at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373981/
Movie Review: "Life is a dream, even in the underworld"
Summary: 4 Stars
Kontroll would have to be one of the most visually arresting and eye-catching films of the year. All the elements are there - mystery, suspense, and humor, it's just a pity that first time director Nimrod Antal's first film, which has fantasy, thriller, and dark-comic elements, couldn't have been a bit better paced.
Some of the scenes are excessively long, and the movie sort of sinks in the middle, as though Antal just can't sustain the tension that he so marvelously creates throughout the first half. Having said that, Kontroll is a mostly rewarding viewing experience, and contains some of the most slickly drawn action sequences that one is likely to see in a movie.
Kontroll opens as a boozy blond struggles to open a champagne bottle as she descends into the Budapest subway. She's barely able to stand up, let alone balance on her high heels; she is seemingly knocked over by the rush of air from an arriving train. Suddenly she vanishes and only one of her red shoes remains.
Enter the ticket controllers who patrol the subway day and night. They are told to be on the look out for "jumpers." Apparently, this girl is just the latest in a long line of people who have been inexplicably jumping onto the tracks. Or have they? One ticket inspector, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) swears he has seen a hooded man lurking about as another victim falls before a speeding train.
The scruffy and unshaven Bulcsú doesn't dare go above ground; he doesn't even bother to report what he's seen. Instead, he spends his days traipsing through this underground netherworld together with his mismatched collection of colleagues, who move along in pack that sometimes resembles an aging street gang.
There's the quick-tempered Muki (Csaba Pindroch) a narcoleptic with a face stained with tomato sauce, and a burned-out old man simply known as the Professor (Zoltan Mucsi). There's also the newest arrival, the impetuous Tibor (Zsolt Nagy), whom Bulcsú takes under his wing.
Bulcsú soon finds himself having to contend with rival crews of ticket takers, a prankster (Bence Matyasi) who keeps eluding Bulcsú and leads him on a race through the subway stations. In one suspenseful sequence, Bulcsú is challenged to go railing: jumping down onto the tracks in a race to the next platform before the midnight expresses approaches from behind.
Bulcsú is also entranced by Sjofi (Eszter Balla), who wears a bear costume, and apparently lives underground, like him. But Bulcsú is the reluctant anti-hero, not only is he frightened of going above ground, but there's something in his past that prevents him from getting too close to people. It's only when he is able to confront his inner demons that he can finally face the light of day.
Is Bulcsú actually the killer? Or is it all just the dark, subversive, and fearful sides of his personality? His paranoid bosses certainly suspect that he knows something about the murders. Partly because he seems so detached, partly because he's a former intellectual and professional who abandoned a promising future aboveground for unknown reasons, and also because he's a surly outsider who, sleeps during breaks on abandoned benches and in the far tunnels.
Completely set in the bowls of the underground transport system, Kontroll is an absurdly and totally maddeningly existential film, It's where a woman inconspicuously rides the train in a bear suit, after-hour raves parties materialize to pulsating dance beats, and men discuss a cooking recipe while cleaning body parts off the track. It's also a movie that is peppered with some of the sexiest and grooviest young men I've ever seen!
This is a very heavily stylized film and is far from realistic, with Antal and cinematographer Gyula Pados shooting the Budapest underground with a gritty and rich detail that gives the film a strange and beguiling mixture of the authentic and hallucinatory.
The film is mostly a type of psychological fantasy, a kind of dream-movie in which we see the world of the kontroll through Bulcsú's eyes, experiencing this underground, subversive, and anti-establishment world - its horrors and possible deliverance - from his embattled and beleaguered point of view. Mike Leonard September 05.
Movie Review: Fun, Frenetic, and Frightening
Summary: 4 Stars
In the Prologue, the narrator relates that his friend director, Nimrod Antal, has made a film about the struggle between good and evil. Using the Hungarian subway system as symbol, they jump start `Kontroll,' (Control), an innovative movie almost exclusively taking place on or near train platforms. In which case, the underground system is hell on earth with its Satan being a black hooded hoodlum morbidly seeking victims to push onto the tracks to collide with oncoming trains. Surveillance cameras abound all over, yet the subway executives (or "suits" as they call them) can't seem to put their finger on the epidemic of alleged suicides they are unable to avert. In between some confrontational scenes, there is plenty going on to keep our attention. Besides being unique, 'Kontroll' has that rare ability to mix laughs, tenderness, and brutality with jarring shifts in a way that actually works. (No wonder Hungary's box office made this movie their homegrown 'Star Wars'.)
The focus starts with a drunken women who stumbles alone on the underground platform, comically fumbling with opening a bottle of champagne. Abruptly, we soon see nothing left of her but half a high-heeled shoe remaining after a high speed train passes. Next, we come to an apparent homeless man, leaning against a post. A man gently tells him that he has a bloody nose. To which he has seemingly stirred belligerence, only we find he is a ticket inspector, Bulscu' (Csany Sa'ndor), who makes the station his home. At first hard to like, his toughness fades later to a good-natured presence, especially given the nature of his position facing rough colleagues and customers. No wonder. For the gruffness, many vignettes show the thankless job of getting customers to pay. Given the prologue's disclaimer of "fiction over fact" [to paraphrase], we certainly are given a vision of purgatory to boot. The morning meeting finds Bulscu' has overslept, but he doesn't miss much with a surly supervisor assigning tasks and urgently lecturing them to save suicidal people jumping onto the tracks. Then, the dreary atmosphere turns to color with myriads of passengers who evade and harass the ticket inspectors. Just a partial cross-section, we get gays and women who flirt with the inspectors to pass on payment with dialogue that is always witty and "fresh". One decent passenger is a beautiful woman patron who wears a bear costume. (One well-edited scene has the employees going to mandatory psychologist sessions. Besides making us laugh, they inadvertently provide a better reason than Michael Moore to have a universal health care system--no matter which side you take on the issue.)
`Kontrol' is a unique movie ride. It could easily have been too bleak, but the variety of development is well constructed. Besides balancing the atmosphere, the transition from surreal to stark realism is nearly ingenious without derailing the plot. `Kontroll' is a quirky film that delivers colorful laughs as well as a menacingly dark atmosphere that is sure to give one gooseflesh. Besides that, I am partial to the way they draw from American chase scenes, like French movie, L'Enfant, yet managing to provide their own playful twists. 'Kontroll' is a movie that matters.
(Special thanks to fellow reviewer, Michael Acuna, who--besides being a tireless resource--recommended this hidden gem and put it on the map.)
Movie Review: Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right
Summary: 4 Stars
I approached this movie with a little trepidation having been so impressed by the earlier, very stylistic movie, Subway. Not wishing to draw comparisons between the two I focussed on this movie in total and was quite impressed with what I found.
The storyline is another in a long line of critiques of the new capitalist order where the metaphor for the old planned socialist economy was the Moscow Metro where there was no such thing as garbage strewn everywhere and where the passengers were behaved and orderly as they would be in such a society. This was replicated elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc but of course, with the collapse of state communism or whatever you may wish to term it, that comlicity and order has apparently broken down.
In such a new world the fragmentation and change is personified by the characters who inhabit theis movie. They are contasted by the sheer stark beauty of the subway system itself in Budapesht where the filmmaker stalks every mile to find stupendous shots of systemic beauty and individuality as integral parts of the oderly system while the inevitable failings of humans under the new system are bared for all to see.
The filmmaker reminds us of his portrayals of good versus evil, black versus white throughout the story in many different ways. His primary characters inhabit a netherworld below ground much like the Morlocks of Wells in the Time Machine. They are often in conflict, many times as dirty denizens of a decaying police force versus those who wish to cheat the sytem to get ahead. The characters which stand out are the three dimensional travellers in conflict while regular humans do not seriously enter the picture.
The outlook is mainly dreary and depressing. The muderer who stalks the subways killing for no apparent reason is the central plot attached to which are the overarching themes and characterisations that the filmaker wishes to prtray. In the end good triumphs over bad and the hero and heroine ascend the escalator into the light in a very moral and religous symbolism, leaving the subway behind.
We take much of our freedoms for granted in the West and it is hard to imagine that the people's of Eastern Europe wished to be free to endure hardship and degredation. The message from this movie however, is one of hope. The hardship and degradation are bearable if people can fight their way out of it. It they can achieve that act itself is infinitely preferable to the ongoing death of a thousand regulations under state socialism.
This is a very thought provoking film and clearly there are issues about capitalism and liberalism in the classical sense, but the overall preference for freedom and for hope is a very strong message to send indeed.