Bibliothèque Pascal, 2010 Dir. Hajdu Szabolcs, Hungary Los Angeles Film Festival, LAFF, 2010 image1.jpeg
Another film from Berlin was the new Hungarian entry, "Bibliotheque Pascal", the fourth feature from director Szabolcs Hajdu who made a big international splash with a gymnastics film entitled "White Palms" in 2006. Where "White Palms" was basically a semi-autobiographical docudrama firmly rooted in reality, "Bibliotheque" is an hallucinogenic excursion into the kinkiest recesses of the mind, brilliantly lensed by DOP Andras Nagy, but firmly rooted in sexual surrealism, excessive sadism and masochism, and weirdness for weirdness sake. This is the kind of film that makes you wonder if the agony is ever going to end but keeps you glued to your seat just because it's impossible to take your eyes off of the main actress, Orsolya Török-Illyés, a rare beauty of a special type, who is shown constantly in lingering closeups.
Plot: In order to regain custody of her daughter, whom she left in the care of her fortune- telling aunt, Mona (Török-Illyés) has to tell a social worker her story. The tale she spins--- and the movie we watch---is a wild, surreal adventure in which people are able to project and enter each other's dreams, and our heroine is sold into slavery in a debauched literary brothel in Liverpool where the patrons act out their literary/sexual fantasies with Lolita, St. Joan, and Desdemona.
Though this is in theory a Hungarian film, the story is set largely in Romania and most of the dialog is in Romanian delivered by a mainly Romanian cast, except for the extended sequence in a British brothel where what dialog there is is in a kind of weird Englishl. The story centers on an hypnotically beautiful single mother Mona (Orsolya Török-Illyés) who is half-Hungarian, half-Romanian and speaks both languages when necessary. At the beginning and at the end of the film she is trying to convince a Romanian social worker that the young daughter she left in the custody of a flaky fortune-telling aunt when she took off for England to work as a prostitute (i,e., sex slave) should be returned to her -- and what happens in between is her incredible tale of suffering and bondage in a grotesque British brothel in Liverpool, borrowed, it would seem from Genet's Balcony with a little input from Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc.
In this super kinky whorehouse which gives the film its title, clients pay to live out literary sex fantasies and Mona is, in fact, assigned to a room called "Joan of Arc". What she suffers there is so unspeakable that you wish they would put her out of her misery already and just burn her at the stake. The story she tells the social worker (which forms the body of the film) is so beyond belief, starting with a handsome psychotic killer who emerges from the sand on a seaside beach and makes her pregnant in an extremely bizarre one night stand at gun-point, then segueing from there via weird train station encounters, over the White Cliffs of Dover to the Pascal Library in Liverpool where the sexual depravities visited upon the poor girl stagger the imagination --except that she seems to enjoy being tortured in a very passive way -- so that her official confessor feels compelled to make her tale sound more "normal" in his final report, because he really wants to restore the kid to her and knows damn well that the naked truth as she has described it will not cut the mustard.
And so she gets her child back and starts telling the kid a fairy tale that seems to be leading into another bizarre movie --well -- well --What can one say? "Not for every taste" to say the least. Some will think its the worst movie they've ever seen, others that they have witnessed an incredible work of art. In any case, this film is definitely over the top and out through the roof, but has some pretty hot cinematic fireworks and a heroine who really has to be seen to be believed --Orsolya Török-Illyésis unforgettable even if the film is a wall-to-wall nightmare. Director Szabolcs was there for a Q and A after the screening, which turned out to be mainly a lecture in Hungarian almost as obscure as the film itself, and evoked few questions from people who seemed to be too stunned to leave the theater just yet. Who knows what evil lurks around the next corner ....
Sent from my iPad
Another film from Berlin was the new Hungarian entry, "Bibliotheque Pascal", the fourth feature from director Szabolcs Hajdu who made a big international splash with a gymnastics film entitled "White Palms" in 2006. Where "White Palms" was basically a semi-autobiographical docudrama firmly rooted in reality, "Bibliotheque" is an hallucinogenic excursion into the kinkiest recesses of the mind, brilliantly lensed by DOP Andras Nagy, but firmly rooted in sexual surrealism, excessive sadism and masochism, and weirdness for weirdness sake. This is the kind of film that makes you wonder if the agony is ever going to end but keeps you glued to your seat just because it's impossible to take your eyes off of the main actress, Orsolya Török-Illyés, a rare beauty of a special type, who is shown constantly in lingering closeups.
Plot: In order to regain custody of her daughter, whom she left in the care of her fortune- telling aunt, Mona (Török-Illyés) has to tell a social worker her story. The tale she spins--- and the movie we watch---is a wild, surreal adventure in which people are able to project and enter each other's dreams, and our heroine is sold into slavery in a debauched literary brothel in Liverpool where the patrons act out their literary/sexual fantasies with Lolita, St. Joan, and Desdemona.
Though this is in theory a Hungarian film, the story is set largely in Romania and most of the dialog is in Romanian delivered by a mainly Romanian cast, except for the extended sequence in a British brothel where what dialog there is is in a kind of weird Englishl. The story centers on an hypnotically beautiful single mother Mona (Orsolya Török-Illyés) who is half-Hungarian, half-Romanian and speaks both languages when necessary. At the beginning and at the end of the film she is trying to convince a Romanian social worker that the young daughter she left in the custody of a flaky fortune-telling aunt when she took off for England to work as a prostitute (i,e., sex slave) should be returned to her -- and what happens in between is her incredible tale of suffering and bondage in a grotesque British brothel in Liverpool, borrowed, it would seem from Genet's Balcony with a little input from Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc.
In this super kinky whorehouse which gives the film its title, clients pay to live out literary sex fantasies and Mona is, in fact, assigned to a room called "Joan of Arc". What she suffers there is so unspeakable that you wish they would put her out of her misery already and just burn her at the stake. The story she tells the social worker (which forms the body of the film) is so beyond belief, starting with a handsome psychotic killer who emerges from the sand on a seaside beach and makes her pregnant in an extremely bizarre one night stand at gun-point, then segueing from there via weird train station encounters, over the White Cliffs of Dover to the Pascal Library in Liverpool where the sexual depravities visited upon the poor girl stagger the imagination --except that she seems to enjoy being tortured in a very passive way -- so that her official confessor feels compelled to make her tale sound more "normal" in his final report, because he really wants to restore the kid to her and knows damn well that the naked truth as she has described it will not cut the mustard.
And so she gets her child back and starts telling the kid a fairy tale that seems to be leading into another bizarre movie --well -- well --What can one say? "Not for every taste" to say the least. Some will think its the worst movie they've ever seen, others that they have witnessed an incredible work of art. In any case, this film is definitely over the top and out through the roof, but has some pretty hot cinematic fireworks and a heroine who really has to be seen to be believed --Orsolya Török-Illyésis unforgettable even if the film is a wall-to-wall nightmare. Director Szabolcs was there for a Q and A after the screening, which turned out to be mainly a lecture in Hungarian almost as obscure as the film itself, and evoked few questions from people who seemed to be too stunned to leave the theater just yet. Who knows what evil lurks around the next corner ....
Sent from my iPad