Másnap

A man wanders through an almost dystopian landscape, trying to find an old farmhouse he has inherited. The people he meets are a bit strange – some ask him to kill someone for them, or try to seduce him, or get him to drink alcohol or just act plain damn weird. But there again, he's pretty weird himself.

This experiment in non-linear storytelling maybe has elements I couldn't figure. Every time I thought I might have a handle on it, the meaning eluded me. It's told in four chapters - The Sky, The Dust, The Wind, The Road. In the packed UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, two people fell asleep within yards of me well before the third chapter. This is admittedly two hours of experimental film making that might be viewed as fairly soporific. The actors utter occasional lines with long silences between, as if each phrase had some deep significance. The gestures and movements follow the same pattern. The denouement partly explains, at least in the sense of a who-dunnit – but fails to fit the pieces together in a logical pattern as far as I could see. The setting is a rural, run-down area of Hungary. The film looks as if it was shot on a nominal budget. As a psychological essay it is perhaps more satisfying – as with early Lynch, the experience is not about having a simple straightforward plot with all the pieces explained and ends tied up with a ribbon. Where the film fails is that it is less interesting that early Lynch. The long pauses verge on being pretentious: but for those who like an enigma (solvable or not), After the Day Before has all the ingredients to allow you to stay up asking each other, so what do you think *that* was about??

In short avoid this film.

Before watching this film the director told the audience that it may not make sense as we watched it (as time is not sequential and the lead character has memory problems) but by the final scene it would all reveal itself to us.

*** Slight Spolier but very important ***

He lied. The direction and the changing time points without of knowledge kept us interested and we needed to know how it all knits together but the ending was so weak with no explanation of why the character(s) were motivated to do it. Very disappointed.

Strange and mixed responses. At no point in this film did I feel dislocated from the plot, even the time-line was within a somewhat tenuous reach but at all times I was certain where and how this story would conclude. I may have had an unfair advantage in reading a novel called 'the Voyeur' by Alain Robbe- Grillet, it won the Prix Des Critiques (the novel not the film). It came as a surprise to see no mention at all of this book in relation to the film, some changes in the story have been made, but certainly not enough to completely liberate it from what was obviously the inspiration. I can only imagine with much remorse at having some knowledge of the story how intriguing a movie this would be for a virgin audience.

I won't spoil the film nor the book by trying to explain the plot, but more to the point just say that this is one hell of an interpretation. Excellent even.

Poor Andrei Tarkovski....

The story is about a middle-aged man, probably a photographer from a big city, who arrives to a lone countryside, into a world of the struggling small farms, where the locals are poor_loser_caricatures, who are not_so_helpful, primitive, but sometimes secretive and almost always rude for the stranger and play disgusting and violent games among them. Our man arrives to a land, when the time seems to be frozen and the opportunity of the return (escape maybe) is offered very soon to him, even before the opening titles run down. The suspense starts, but will fade away to nowhere with the sympathy of the audience.

The chopped and mixed episodes are repeated with small alterations, and big confusion (see Pulp Fiction or Mulholland Drive), but the movie runs with a very slow pace and focusing a lot on the treasures of the nature (tiny hills, gentle slopes, leafy trees, a beautiful and mysterious creek) and sleazy, dirty indoors with worn-out countrymen waiting for the hopeless redemption (see Stalker).

The movie 'Másnap' is a missed opportunity for a good and tasty film. The outdoor shots are delightful for the fans of the original and perfect cinematography, but the indoors are dull and sometimes even stupid. The feeling of a timeless, unforgiving world with multiple spaces and times for one act is defined deliberately and on a fine way, but for nothing as the following episodes are dull and annoying.

The film borrows some pictures from Tarkovski (Solaris, Stalker), Kurosawa (Rashomon), Hitchcock basics and even from Kobayashi's Kwaidan, but there is no connection, no purpose for them.

The scene follows the murder, when the stone is thrown to the creek and we see the water to flow and the water-plants bending, is a direct copy from Andrei Tarkovski and is very painful near to the end of the struggling and tiring, time-wasting film. The world of Másnap has nothing common with the great Tarkovski movies, and no real connection to Hitchcock or Kurosawa...

The script is divided for parts as 'The Sky', 'The Dust', 'The Wind' and 'The Road' but it makes no difference: it is a flop with a lot of stolen motifs from the classics with no real dialog, no real story, no coherence.

The slow pace, strange faces and dialogs are just like in a bad dream, but a dream is not as long as this disaster.

So the result is about 50 % - it should have been completed, mainly with the scissors...

I saw this film years ago and it really stuck with me. Long, brooding shots, cinematography that evokes Tarkovsky, deserted landscapes and intense characterization. So many films from this part of the world that have never been seen by most people - it brings to mind another Hungarian film 'Time Stands Still', a masterpiece which remains in obscurity today. Masnap I somehow acquired on a busted old VHS tape, and have watched the film repeatedly in that format. It has proved difficult to acquire a better copy.

I've seen two of Attila Janisch's films, and found they both contained a strong, clear vision and a haunting tone. I hope to see more.