As with many low-budget filmmakers, David Lynch is a strong influence on Stickland who admitted that the films sound design owes a great deal to Lynch’s own low budget feature film debut Eraserhead, with it’s complex and often powerful musical choices (indeed I would gladly purchase the films soundtrack were it available on CD or for download). Thankfully the music never over whelms the films content (a common mistake within low-budget films, directors often thinking that because they can use music it automatically means they should use as much music as possible), but more appropriately the music here works in conjunction with the films more cryptic visual sequences, haunting and sinister images of the Romanian wilderness or mother and son sitting on their horse-drawn carriage staring into the distance. Adding to the sense of environment and mood and without the aid of flashy editing or even particularly bold lighting. This landscape has remained unexploited for the purposes of cinema, and Strickland maximises the value of this commodity through his haunting visuals and magnificently balanced sonic ebb and flow.
M.Dawson |
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With 30,000 Euros, great skill, artistry, and an indomitable spirit; British director Peter Strickland embarked on a four-year journey to Romania and Hungary to create his feature film debut. Fighting against a constant shortage of finance, as well as the language and cultural barrier, he eventually succeeded in creating his film Kalalin Varga, which debuted at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2009 where it was awarded the Silver Bear. Much has been written about Strickland’s resourcefulness and his decision to shoot outside of the UK with his inheritance money (and what that implies about how difficult it is to secure film funding in the UK if you’re an unknown talent. Stickland is far from a unique case and Sight & Sound recently published an entire article about filmmakers who left the UK to make their films abroad as it was impossible for them here. The fact that Sight & Sound can dedicate an entire article to this subject should tell you everything you need to know, and they didn’t include the many British directors who moved to Hollywood and never looked back like Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, or Sam Mendes). Indeed Stickland’s story is an impressive one in itself, one mans gamble for his art, a story made all the more impressive by just how effective his final product actually is. Looking at some of the other UK 2009 releases and in the opinion of this reviewer Katalin Varga is a superior film to the following: David Fincher’s monumentally dull The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zack Synder’s over wrought Watchmen, Ron Howard’s by-the-numbers Frost/Nixon, Bryan Singer’s flawed Valkyrie, Gus Van Sant’s conventional Milk, Spike Jonze’s misjudged Where the Wild Things Are, Stephen Daldry’s Oscar-bait middle brow literary adaptation The Reader, Quentin Tarantino’s sickeningly self-indulgent and painfully protracted Inglorious Basterds and of course James Cameron’s ultra-derivative calamity of a fair ground ride Avatar. All of which were produced with the aid of budgets and resources greatly exceeding Stickland’s film. Thus proving (to myself at least) that you don’t need money, you don’t need big stars, you don’t need a best selling novel to adapt, you don’t need world-class technicians, you don’t need an award-winning director, you don’t need any of these things to make a great film. As the old saying goes: “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em scream, make ‘em fall in love” the simplification of which being: get your audience involved at all costs - nothing else matters. Katalin Varga most definitely succeeds on this front. Story is everything, without a good story you might as well not bother making the film at all. The twisted irony for Hollywood is that the high-flying Executive Producers are well aware of this fundamental rule of film making, which is why they continually interfere with the script and often ruin potentially brilliant films with their ill-informed and specious interventions. The more money there is, the more there is at stake, the less control the writer has and the less common sense everyone else has. For Strickland however, there was no meaningful measure of money, his largely self-financed film had almost a quarter of the budget of last years other low-budget success story, Eran Creevy’s Shifty which was produced for £100,000 and was dubbed a ‘micro-budget’ project. With less than a ‘micro-budget’ to make Katalin Varga, there is no question that what we are witnessing is the director’s vision, as intended, with no interference. 
If one were to summarise the story of Katalin Varga in the most basic terms (a woman seeks revenge on her rapists by hunting them down and killing them) then potential audiences would be right to judge the film negatively upon initial narrative appraisal. The premise and its setting in the Romanian wilderness seems disturbingly close to Meir Zarchi’s dreadful 1978 low budget horror movie I Spit on Your Gave (AKA: Day of the Woman) which is often cited as the worst film ever made by major film critics, or Michael Winner’s almost equally terrible 1993 film Dirty Weekend. But such fears should be put to rest as this is where the comparisons end and neither films overtly dubious sexual politics are present within Katalin Varga. We begin the story with our protagonist (the titular Katalin) arriving home to discover that her dreadful secret has gotten out. Her husband now knows that he is not the father of her son, that she was raped years ago and that the child belongs to one of the rapists. After being forced out of her home she takes her child, Orbán, with her and goes in search of those responsible for ruining her life. After finding and killing the first rapist, a group of men posing as police officers begin pursuing her, but Katalin and Orbán escape them long enough to find the second rapist Antal who is now a farm hand and lives with his wife who knows nothing of his dark secret. Will Katalin kill Antal? Will the men catch up with her before she can? Will Antal’s wife find out? Will Orbán discover his true parentage? The second half of the film is filled with tension as each of these questions hang in the balance and the potential for another murder is always present.
The film has simplicity on its side; at just eighty-two minutes in length, and with no meaningful subplot to speak of (except perhaps Orbán’s increasingly irritable responses to his mothers seemingly irrational actions) there is no excessive narrative baggage and no sustained pondering or wearing of ‘shoe-leather’ within the protagonists arc. It is a revenge film - plain and simple. However, as with the very best revenge films, the vendetta itself is complicated by issues or morality and reality as well as physical obstacles. The reality of vengeance is not as simple as Katalin had once fantasised and when confronted with a rapist who has clearly moved on and improved his life as well as held onto his guilt for his actions for many years afterwards, Katalin is forced to re-evaluate her position. More over we soon learn that the first recipient of her vengeance did not actually rape Katalin at all (he was a willing accessory but not a participant) and Kataln’s tearful reaction after bludgeoning him to death with a large stone is the first hint that perhaps revenge is best served cold, but it’s not always possible to do so. From a certain point of view, Katalin’s vengeance is ill measured and excessive, she was raped and beaten but her own intensions are homicidal - an eye-for-an-eye this is not. What will Katalin achieve with this excessive revenge? Justice? Satisfaction? Perhaps so, but she still won’t be able to return home and instead of simply searching for a new village to re-build her life with her child she will now constantly have to look over her shoulder in case a loved-one of her victim should ever come looking for her. Whilst the film does explore the question of violence begetting violence as many of the great revenge films have done through the years, it also examines the meaninglessness of vengeance. Not through the methods that say Park Chan Wook’s Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance examined the subject (by demonstrating that eventually all violence you inflict on others will catch up with you, and that avenging an accident is not revenge at all) but instead by presenting the cold and desolate reality of revenge as an action – it ultimately achieves nothing. Justice? No. Satisfaction? No. Will it even prevent further crimes against women who were in a similar position to Katalin? Again the answer is no. Katalin Varga might at first be mistaken as yet another in a long line of female centric (yet male originated) revenge fantasies about beautiful women killing disgusting men with a gun or a knife (or any other unmistakably Freudian extensions of manhood) a film masquerading as feminism that is in fact the very worst form of reductive sexism, choosing to display so-called female sexual empowerment through male centric behaviour (the female uses the man’s ‘weapon’ against him, effectively the woman learns how to behave like she has a penis and is therefore empowered). But such fears are soon dispelled by Strickland’s direction and writing.
The complexities of revenge are made all the more powerful by the central performance of Hilda Péter, (a theatre actor Stickland discovered) here in her feature film debut. Stickland first saw Péter perform on the stage and invited her to work on the project with him. Soon enough he’d also cast most of that theatre productions cast members in the film as well. The casting is largely excellent (with only one or two supporting performances in the first act hitting some very occasional false-notes) and in the supporting duties Tibor Pálffy is particularly impressive as Antal both in terms of performance and aesthetic (his wind torn face and long black hair make him instantly cinematic). But it is Péter who holds the film together. At once venerable, determined, resourceful, seductive and menacing, she manages to capture all of the various facets of her character with mesmerising results. This magnetic performance is one of Stickland’s greatest assets, for poor casting in his title role would have perhaps ruined his film without needing another mistake. But instead it solidifies the film and guarantees its success. If any doubt remained as to Péter’s excellence, it all but completely evaporates during Katalin Varga’s stand-out scene which pushes the film to another level as Katalin, Antal and his wife go for a rowing boat ride, just the three of them down river, the discussion turns to children. Antal’s wife is barren and thinks that one of them must have sinned for God to deny them children, Katalin talks of her own child and how Orbán is the by-product of her rape, with no where to go and no way to silence Katalin without drawing attention to his own guilt Antal is forced to continue rowing the boat whilst Katalin goes into graphic detail about the rape (even going so far as describe how she was ‘dry’ when the rapist penetrated her and how it burned her insides) meanwhile the boat turns, the camera stays fixed on Katalin’s perfectly still face as the river and the surrounding wild life violently rotates behind her with disorientating results. Her stillness is a manifestation of Katalin’s inner calm at that point, whilst the violent movements of the landscape around her are a result of Antal who is in control of the boats direction and is therefore a manifestation of his inner panic. The contrast of stillness and violent motion is stunningly realised, and gives the scene extra weight. Stickland could have opted for a flashback of the event, but rightly decided that Katalin’s recounting would be more powerful. The scene is but one of many moments of directorial ingenuity, with just a boat and three actors Stickland has managed to make a scene so effortlessly cinematic that it puts all of the aforementioned big budget films to shame, for none of those films within their bloated runtime, with their established ‘stars’ or big budgets could conjure a single scene that even comes close to the power Stickland conjures here. Where there resources were seemingly limitless, his were very much limited and as a famous idiom states: “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Something all modern film makers should remember.
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