Left Field Cinema

If you don’t know a reel of Hungarian cinema, frankly my dead readers it’s nothing to be damned about. With eight foreign-film Oscar nominations, Hungary has had minor success, the one major success being Istvan Szabo who after being Hungary’s fourth nom in 1980 for Confidence, did a Ingmar Bergman, being nominated a second year in row, producing the 1981 winner and his crowing achievement, Mephisto. Szabo is half a partnership often called the Hungarian incarnation of Werner Herzog-Klaus Kinski, with his Klaus, the one-of-kind lead Klaus Maria Brandauer, being a great foil in talent, madness and Confidence.

Adapted from Klaus Mann’s novel of the same name, Szabo really did a German World War II film acceded to Tin Drum, Mann’s novel inspired by his stage-performing brother Gustaf Grundgens, who like our lead Hendrik (Brandauer) abandoned his own political views to support the Nazi party who could do so for he and his more self-controlled theatre productions of Faust. We’re introduced to ‘Heinz the performer’ in a passion love scene with his actor-lover Juliette (Karin Boyd), one of his many left-swinging friends here in Hamburg. Hendrik has a wife also, daughter of an important officer, the marriage helps as his star rises to be seen beyond German borders.

Mann’s novel is lifted to the stage by Szabo, given that the film reminisces of many play adaptations, the film is dark, the comedic performances giving light, if you don’t know of the Faust legend you get a theoretical look at the myth, different to the 1925 silent film Faust, Szabo shows his theatre-roots with direction that centres on character and interaction, a great foil for early German expressionism.

The films statements are purely done in symbolism, think of Heinz the actor in full make-up confronting the real Nazi’s, how the mythic characters of Mephistopheles & Dr. Faustus are acted here in the theatre and backrooms 1930’s Germany with its own diminishing value, power and devil. The Faust legend’s psychological bargain reflecting this, mankind’s greatest rise of fascism.

Brandauer is a huge presence, expressing everything we thought he might keep inside, Brandauer would go on to give a par-performance in the bogey Out of Africa and a good turn in White Fang. Boyd as Juliette is one actor character how can stand up to our lead, undermine him, being their love, which is more for each other’s expression and passion, is secretive given the times. Rolf Hoppe is the other great free-spirit as the Nazi general mingling in Reich Theatre; he’s the off-stage 1903’s incarnation of Mephistopheles as a counter play to Hendrik becoming a true, poetic stage-up of the eventually head of the National Theatre.

Compared with current Hungarian cinema, Mephisto is about a showoff, it isn’t a show-off film like Taxidermia, it also goes even further in satire than other award winning wartime-theatre films like Underground or Luchino Visconti’s only great film The Damned, Mephisto’s comedy/satire is old-school line-delivery and situation, as a WWII film its one of the great, understated achievements in the dramatisation-can.

Darcy S. McCallum