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Plot:
This Hungarian box office smash hit and winner of the Prix de la Jeunes award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival takes place entirely underground in the Budapest subway system. A variety of personalitie...( read more 
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Recent Reviews
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MCT:June 28, 2008Not Interested
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MCT:May 29, 2008Szofi: "[at subway vending machines] Nice place. Come here often?
Bulcsú: Only when I really want to impress a girl."
An enormous crowd pleaser at several 2004 film festivals throughout the world - picking up the "Prix de la Jeunesse" (Award of the Youth) at Cannes - and young Hungarian-American Nimród Antal's film début, Kontroll is one of the most creative and original films I've ever seen. Part black comedy, part action/thriller and part allegorical tale of redemption, it mixes elements from standard American urban thrillers with the feverish, dreamlike distortions of classic Eastern European art cinema, played out in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Budapest subway system, the world's second oldest.
There's something very appealing and appropriate about subway systems as an outsider film location, underworlds in which those who do not fit in or have rejected the values of society above can feel at home, subsections of society in which small pockets of precariously maintained civilisation are connected by a large network of dark tunnels that could house just about anything, areas into which no sane person would venture without the protection of a big metal underground train. Antal takes full advantage of that evocative locale by setting all of Kontroll down there - shooting the entire film at night in the stations and tunnels of the Budapest Metro - with the world outside and above never glimpsed, except as a distant hazy light just above the topmost stairways. The result: a highly exciting, visually alive thriller that stands as one of the most promising débuts in recent film history.
Kontroll opens with a message from the director of the BM, stating that the film we are about to watch is a work of fiction - which, therefore, has to be seen symbolically and not literally - and that the employees of the Metro don't behave as shown. We then understand why. According to Antal's vision, the Budapest subway system is the kind of place where people threaten each other with Gypsy curses and dirty syringes, amateur welders work on the rails, and even the white-collar business travellers don't bother buying a ticket. Administered by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the system employs five-member crews of ticket collectors - controllers - to ensure law, order, and proper payment of fares.
This is the story of one group, an unkempt unit already on probation for breaking the rules. There's the leader - our protagonist - the mysterious and damaged Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) who never goes above ground, the elegant and middle-aged Professor (Zoltán Mucsi), the belligerent, slightly insane Muki (Csaba Pindroch), Lescó the narcoleptic (Sándor Badár) and the new boy, Tibi (Zsolt Nagy). They're the kind of group fused together by foul working conditions, general anarchy, and the hate of the general public. They're also the kind of guys who routinely wake up smeared with blood, ketchup, or something worse, and it's somewhat normal for them to walk through a door into a fight with pipe-wielding, face-painted hooligans. (The existence of these gangs is never explained; they're just there.)
Bulcsú's motley crew are constantly faced with public contempt, erupting hostility, wild chases and violence on their daily rounds - complicated by the insolent cheats (including their nemesis, a fast punk called "Bootsie" who wears a CD headset and often sprays paint in the controllers' faces); the callous indifference of their subway system bosses; the contempt of a rival, slicker group of inspectors; and the assaults of a mysterious, hooded serial killer who has been terrorizing the system, randomly pushing passengers off the platforms into the paths of oncoming trains.
One of the problems I have with leading characters in many Hollywood films is that, even those in the most grubby and punishing jobs, don't look like the people who actually carry out these tasks, but good-looking actors pretending to be them. In Eastern European cinema the opposite occurs. There's not a face in Kontroll that doesn't look like it has wandered in from the back streets of Budapest, and the film is all the better for it. Hollywood relies on the recognition factor for character engagement - oh look, it's Tom Cruise, I know him, therefore I know the character - but in Kontroll you engage with the characters in part because the faces so perfectly fit. You feel you know them precisely because, in a way, you do - you've met them, worked with them, are related to them. Perhaps you even are them.
It helps, of course, that they are genuinely funny people, or at least funny to us - they have a somewhat negative world view arising from working in a largely thankless job that offers the thin illusion of power to those who would otherwise never command it. Their authority is tenuous at best - the controllers are identified only by a simple armband pulled over their regular clothes, their slovenly attitude and scruffy appearance making it all too easy for those they confront to ignore, argue with or even attack them. It is these very confrontations that provide some of the funniest moments, and if a couple of these groan under the weight of painful stereotyping - the smiling, camera wielding Japanese family, the outrageously camp predatory gay - many of the others are inventive and wittily handled, and in one case involving a syringe and a saw, borderline surreal.
The great unspoken question of the film is this: why is Bulcsú down there? He doesn't just work in the subway - as we find out in the opening scene, he lives there 24 hours a day, sleeping on benches and empty platforms after the last train stops running. In one scene, we find that Bulscú has left a job - not named, though his former colleague's words and possessions make either architect or mathematician seem the most likely possibilities - at which he was quite good, and which surely was more profitable than his current job.
Antal's messages are so subtle you don't even notice they're under your skin until they're already there. Bulscú relishes the loner mentality he can cultivate in the subway, and Antal's crafty direction heightens that feeling of isolation to the point where it becomes incredibly ominous. The contradiction between the closed-in world of the underground and the wide-open way in which Antal frame it is a brilliant representation of Bulscú's mindset - the underground may be a finite network, but to him it represents more freedom than the surface world ever did.
He has a different take on the underground. For him, it's not just a workday hell, as it is for his co-worker-mates; it's a source of magic, adventure, athletic triumph (he's a crack tunnel-racer) and romance. Bulscú's world-view starts to shift with the introduction of Szofi (Eszter Balla), a pretty, weird girl who rides the subway dressed in a teddy-bear costume. Representing the good side of human nature, she is a stark contrast to the faceless killer's random attacks. In the end, Bulscú must come face to face with both.
Many people have described Nimród Antal as the Hungarian Danny Boyle. With the film's slick, jazzy aesthetic and high beats per minute, it's relatively easy to notice how Kontroll resembles Trainspotting - the weird little guy (Badár) even looks a little like Robert Carlyle's Begbie - although it also reminds Doug Liman's work. Point is: Antal has talent. And he obviously knew where to draw inspiration from. As for the acting, Sándor Csányi is a marvellously magnetic actor, and he inhabits the whole Brando-Dean-De Niro-Pacino persona with impudent skill and deep inner emotionality. The ensemble is a fine one too, salty character actors with pungent faces and lines. But the truest star of Kontroll, of course, is the Budapest underground itself, which I very much hope to visit one day.
Vilmos Zsigmond's apprentice DP Gyula Pados' fulsome cinematography makes of the underground sets the kind of textured iconographic landscape of Wim Wenders' late American films. A dream (paced by electronica group Neo's rowdy, fantastic score), in which Bulcsú finds himself crawling through something like an endless vaginal tunnel, is the moment when Kontroll comes fully alive: it's the juncture between metaphor, craft, and narrative - and for almost all of its final hour, the film maintains an unbelievably high level of invention and insight. It's a great Sci-Fi piece, a razor-sharp satire, a horrific thriller, a lyrical fantasy and an impressive calling card for an emerging Hungarian cinema. Fantastic! -
MCT:April 29, 2008
Incredible first half. Full of originality, heart-pounding suspense and the funniest antiheroism I've seen. (Thank goodness bus/trolley monthly passes exist.) Damn second half could've made this, a debut film from the director, something excellent. I liked the fact that the entire thing was filmed in the subway, but that ending got on my nerves.
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MCT:October 3, 2007This is just a nuts movie. I really like the train-running they do.
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MCT:August 16, 2007would like to see
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MCT:November 22, 2008
Eerie underground settings help this droll melancholic tale of unloved ticket inspectors, along with an eclectic score and the obvious affection the director has for society's outsiders.
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