Imagining Interiors: Kontroll

Instead of the scheduled Australian film The Well, which was unavailable tonight, we were treated to Kontroll, a Hungarian film made by American-born Nimrod Antal in 2003. After gaining acclaim with this film Antal has gone on to have a career in Hollywood, most recently directing Predators for Robert Rodriguez. I am glad I didn’t know that going into this movie, though, and was able to watch it with an open mind.

The film takes place entirely in the Budapest subway system and initially follows a group of misfit ticket collectors as they try to perform their jobs with some semblance of dignity in the seediest part of the subway line where train patrons are more likely to physically threaten them, offer them the services of a prostitute or play deaf rather than simply show their rail pass. Filming in the actual subway, Antal makes this world feel real and alive, and does an excellent job setting up his main actors as a band of likeable losers who try to do their best in spite of a hostile environment and their own limitations. If the passengers themselves weren’t bad enough, there’s also an unseen murderer lurking somewhere in the bowels of the subway system who has developed a habit of pushing complete strangers in front of moving trains.

After the first twenty minutes I was impressed with this movie, which I thought had created the perfect set-up: our small group of weary and unwitting workers would cross paths with this murderer, and the results would be disastrous, but in the end we would learn just what these misfits were made of.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the movie that Antal decided to make. Instead, as the movie goes on most of the crew of losers drop to the background as he focuses on their most adept member, a mysterious loner named Bulcsú who dropped out of a “normal” society and now sleeps in the subway like a homeless person because … well, we never really find out. Eventually the movie turns into long stretches of watching Bulcsú sort of wander around the subway with no clear goal or motivation.

It’s still stylishly done, but the promise of the first half hour is badly squandered as the movie becomes more psychological and symbolic without really giving us a reason to care about Bulcsú or his psychology.

In the end the murderer subplot does resurface for a showdown with Bulcsú which is well staged and shows off the skills Antal would eventually get hired for in Hollywood, but ultimately has no real dramatic weight.

To be charitable to the last half of the film, I would assume that Antal, who was working from his own script, intended for his movie to have some of the dreamlike qualities that Eraserhead does, where the literal meaning takes backseat to whatever symbolic meaning the audience takes from the film. But Eraserhead works because it is a tightly controlled film, and Kontroll feels a bit like Atal threw in everything he could get to stick. The result is an interesting film that ultimately feels like a wasted opportunity to make something truly terrific. But I suppose it got the director a job!