Dealer

Gradually, I've come to appreciate slowness in cinema. I'm getting sort of fed up with action-packedness, video clip-like editing and the fact that if for ten seconds no one speaks on the screen the audience starts chatting, because obviously, there is nothing important going on.

However, I do not think much of this film of Fliegauf Benedek. I appreciated hist last piece (Rengeteg), I liked it's sketch-based structure, the amateur freshness of acting and especially the language, which is farther to the artistic, created language of the Hungarian cinema in the last couple of decades than anything I've seen for a long time. Now, in Dealer all this are present, but they rather work against the movie. The actors are terribly, incredibly bad (consider Barbara or the mathematician girl). If this is conscious than it is simply BAD. The language is terribly artificial - and there is no meaning for this at all. They usually quote that Dealer is slow and beautiful. I think, you have to be a very good director to be able to direct a slow film that works. For me this wasn't slow, but boring. I reckon, I understand why he wanted to make it so slow, but then there has to be something else to keep the movie alive - most favorably actors. Who act. All in all, I think this film is repulsively artificial, pretentious and pretty much forced.

I really loved this movie. I expected it to be odd and slow, knowing that the director was the AD on songs from the second floor which was the weirdest movie I've ever seen. And it didn't disappoint. I loved the camera movement and the sound was perfectly haunting. The main character was incredibly likable if completely perplexing. What made this movie interesting for me were all the odd characters the dealer was forced to deal with. That first scene when he runs into the guy in the tooth outfit was damn funny and just set the stage for a wandering and depressing story. I love that kind of stuff. But the main reason I'm writing this is to ask if anyone knows what song was playing during the credits. I would love to know...

You might like Fliegauf's "Dealer" maybe if you haven't seen his earlier films. They are all clones, of which "Dealer" is at least the 4th of a kind, the others being "Is there life before death?", "Talking Heads" and "Rengeteg". His films use the same schema: extremely long close-ups of monologues. You can call this a "personal style", but it is also a trade-off for creativity and experimenting.

The reason why "Dealer" has been so successful in Hungary and elsewhere is probably because the issue of drugs is overpoliticised and it has been de facto taboo. In the last decade or so there have been very few Hungarian films on this topic, all of them were depicting drugs (undifferentiatedly) as the ultimate evil. "Dealer" certainly has a different approach, because it makes you mostly laugh at, and/or - to a lesser extent - feel sorry for drug users, whereas the other movies were intended mostly to make you hate drugs (and/or - to a lesser extent - also feel sorry for drug users). So this movie suits for both pro-drug and anti-drug people, because of not making any clear statements about the issue. It is yet to be seen whether Fliegauf or any other Hungarian director could make an intelligent and socially significant impact on the issue of drugs in Hungary.

This film really is pretty slow, but the atmosphere is so strong and depressive, that it simply can't be boring. I enjoyed every second of the movie and I really love the slow camera movement and the concrete, although not naturalistic dialogues. In this things nothing is showed as we can see it in the real life, but at the same time, everything in this film is completely true. The things work, and they are seen from a completely different point of view as in other drug-films. This film really shows a prototype of a new dealer. We can't talk about characters, they are prototypes, but they are made perfectly. The mood of the film is fascinating, meditating and exciting. Those bizarre sounds... I mean, in this film, everything is in it's right place, I've never seen another so clear and original film, with a complex view of a problem. This is why I love this movie.

During the 1980's, no director fascinated me and often frustrated me more than Tarkovsky, the Russian who added a new dimension to the viewing requirements of an audience. His wonderful "Solaris", his incredibly slow and drawn-out "Stalker", his magnificent "Andrei Rublev" and his demanding and enigmatic "Sacrifice" were all noteworthy in that no-one who saw any of them could, I believe, ever forget them, as the viewer grappled, for years to come, on what Tarkovsky had sought and/or achieved. With "Dealer", we have the movie which has probably the best soundtrack I have encountered. The purr of a cat fills the theatre with stereo magnificence and a "whistling wind" sounds backgrounds almost every minute of the movie. It never dominates the story, but it enhances the slow deliberation on the ever-swirling camera, which advances and retreats on the actor and which is a marvelous call for intense concentration by the viewer. An audience who was not prepared to concentrate would probably call "Dealer" too slow or ponderous; absolutely not!: it shows the true poetry of cinema which is all too rarely encountered. Full marks to the director and the actors for creating what I consider one of the best movies I have seen in years...and I see a huge number of movies.