Delta

The scene consists of the wetlands around a large river. The people are a family and a number of people from the small village they live in. Life is on a pretty much normal path until one of the family members, a man in his thirties, returns after a period of being away. He wants to live in a cabin he wants to build himself, right in the middle of the wetlands. All starts off well. He's getting the materials he needs for the building, the provisions he needs for living. Then he gets company - his sister joins him in the building of the cabin. And as time passes by and the cabin starts to take shape, things start to turn a bit ugly - the two of them cross a border that brother and sister should not cross.

And there is the tale of the film. How does one deal with a taboo like this? Brother and sister as a pair. Can one accept it? Or is it something that should not be tolerated, no matter the costs of breaking them up? This film, worked out very soberly (which is an absolute plus), shows how people respond to something like this happening and draws a very fine line between trying to grow sympathy for the brother and sister - and a cooler distance towards the people of the town. The ending is easy to predict - it is inevitable given the situation. It's a bitter pill though. And so we have it: a harsh message packed in the most sober wrapping.

8 out of 10 pained relatives

A young man comes back from wandering to his home town on the Danube (in Romania). We don't know how long he's been gone or much about what he's been doing. When people ask him intrusive questions he just stares at them. He looks very ragged, like he hasn't had a shave or a haircut in three months.

He finds out when he briefly visits mum that he's got a half-sister called Fauna. He decides he wants to live out in the marshes of the delta, and Fauna runs off with him, in an incestuous fever. Some of you may have heard of the phenomenon referred to as Genetic Sexual Attraction. This is when siblings live apart until they meet at adulthood, at which point they feel an overwhelming sexual attraction for one another. So just in case anyone would feel the incestuous side of the story is unrealistic, I promise you it isn't.

Mihail and Fauna live in a shack in the delta, building a house on stilts in the middle of the lake during the daytime. This is presumably so they can get away from the copious amphibians, and the toad chorus that is their bedtime accompaniment. The toads actually may well represent the townspeople.

It's a pretty minimalistic and slow film (the credits include a thanks to Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky), with marvellous cinematography. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély is into his abstract patterns and we see some great shots for example of timber stacks and swirling inky black water. There's also a panning shot of the delta that would make a Dutch genre painter salivate, and a funeral scene that would stir the bones of Tarkovsky. There are moments to sigh and gasp at the cinematography.

It's obvious all along that things aren't going to end well. Fauna's stepfather is jealous and the local scum have decided that Fauna and Mihail are setting themselves up above everyone else. What is beautiful, tear it down.

The film reminds me of an aphorism I heard once heard, there are two peasants, the first of whom has a cow. The second peasant is visited by God who says that he is willing to grant him one wish; the ignorant peasant's wish is that God kills his neighbour's cow.

It's not a licentious film; there is no emphasis on the incest and the sex side of things. However there are scenes that are not for the faint of heart.

Some reviewers have tried to paint a picture of this film as incomprehensible; don't be misled into believing that. There are even mystical touches to this film, there's something deep and primal and wet about the delta; I felt almost like I was waste deep in water at points. The delta is maybe about a closeness to God, or whatever secular equivalent you feel deep within. The delta is where the land crumbles away, it's fertile and gliding into an ocean. Forget it's the Danube and the Black Sea, and feel the essence, the fertility, the clarity, and the flow. At the end I was left with the raw taste of vodka and watermelon, and an intense feeling of immense communal jealousy.

I recently saw this at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival. Mihail (Felix Lajko) has saved his money in the city to return to the village where his mother (Lili Monori) lives with her boyfriend (Sandor Gaspar) and his half sister Fauna (Orsolya Toth). Mihail sets out to build a house on the river delta on land his father owned. Fauna helps Mihail with the construction and lives in a hut with him while the construction his under way. The villagers consider Mihail an outsider and are opposed to the idea of a half brother and sister living alone together. Writer/director Kornel Mandruczo in a script co-written by Yvette Biro offers this rural tale of a developing incestuous relationship in a film beautifully shot by cinematographer Matyas Erdely and superbly edited by David Jancso. The film looks so good that every scene is a virtual painting but the storyline is a little weak with underdeveloped characters, weak dialog and a plodding pace. This perhaps may have worked better as a 20 minute short film but stretched out into a feature with little background on the characters and village life weakens it. I would give this a 6.5 out of 10.

... I think that Delta is a very bad movie, in the sense that the plot is not not developed enough as carry the film and the acting is extremely poorly directed and conducted.

Paradoxically though, it has some of the most amazing photography and camera work that I've ever seen, so in a way it sadly becomes the purest example of what is the typical alternative European movie these days (with some exceptions, of course!): beautiful, but bad. So bad that it seems like some sort of sketch making a parody of European movies, so bad that it makes it even funny.

The main actor spends all the time looking down, probably trying to give the impression of living in some deep state of introspection. The girl gets raped every time she goes out. The nicest character is a small turtle playing the role of itself. They fortunately hardly speak. End of.

Delta wants to sound like some deep work of art, but it is just artificial and extremely pretentious in the end of the day. Horrible movie, wonderful painting.

Having difficulty understanding other reviewers, including major film critics, description of the film. The central sexual encounter is a violent rape by the stepfather - not incest. At no point do we see any incest or I would suggest any hint of incest. Brotherly love we do see, but in such a way as the bigoted may well encounter incest in there minds. As is the incest is in the eyes of those who cannot read the film, as it is in the peasants who cannot tolerate the intruder. A perfect image of misreading occurs when we have silhouettes behind a sheet, cleverly implying a sexual reading, only for us to be brought short when we realise it is the pegging out of the washing. What we do see is male violence to women. We learn that the half-brother is much affected by nursing a girl who had got pregnant " I had to nurse her, the baby was stillborn, But she disappeared" Owes a bit too much to Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, and these bit come over as mannered. Given better fortunes in the making of the film the pacing may well have been better considered. and the overly beautiful camera better integrated into the story, a story which was rescued in the making.