Les sans-espoir

Szegénylegények is one of the best films I've seen. Even though it is not very violent or graphic, I went through same emotional scale as I did watching Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo. Group of men, subdued and prisoned, are submitted to different traps by their jailers to find their leader. There's no way out, just another trap after another. A friend who I watched it with commented that it's like Kafka without any humor.

Black & white film suits The Round Up perfectly. Contrast in photography, white buildings and dark figures give a very cold feeling, which contributes to movie's hopeless atmosphere.

"In the third act, cunning skulduggery is played up to reveal the naïveté of the corralled preys, a false promise takes an about-face to take the winds out of those elated's sails, a cog in the wheel doesn't have a prayer to be reprieved, Jancsó's allegorical upbraiding (especially in the wake of Hungary's failed 1956 uprising against Soviet Russia) hits like a gut punch, miracle never occurs to the defeated, persistence can hardly be parlayed into other people's mercy, not least in the political imbroglio."

read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore.

Cinematography in Eastern Europe during the 40 years of the Communist regimes was subject to very close ideological and artistic supervision, as the rulers understood very well the power of cinema as a propaganda tool, either explicit in the newsreels or documentary films or implicit as mass entertainment. Yet, talents of exception existed, cinema schools and exceptional directors and actors made memorable movies which fought censorship and bureaucratic intrusion to make films written in their own language - a language that was eluding direct critics of the oppressive systems but were yet establishing through image and visual metaphors the communication between the artists and their audiences. Although lesser known than their Polish and Czech counterparts, the Hungarian school had also at least two top level directors - Miklós Jancsó and István Szabó, and was also continuing a school of film makers and cinematographers who had made it to Hollywood in the first half of the century. 'The Round-Up' (the original title is 'Szegénylegények' which would translate approximately as 'The Poor Lads') is one of the best if not the best film of Miklós Jancsó, considered also as one of the best Hungarian movies ever made. I have seen it 52 years after its release, and all the reasons and the exceptional qualities are still here.

In one of the few concessions that Jancsó may have made to the ideological kommissars the introductory part of the film places the story in a very specific historic moment - 1869, two decades after the revolutions that shook Europe in the middle of the 19th century and which led to the formation of the dual Austro-Hungarian empire. As the last pockets of resistance were liquidated, the remaining patriots were gathered in a sort of concentration camps in the middle of the endless Hungarian plains (the 'puszta'). No means were spared to identify and eliminate the heads of the revolt, including torture, blackmail, and the use of informing traitors. However everything in the tone, the style, the text indicates that Jancsó was aiming higher and was telling an universal story, one which is the same as the one told by many survivors of camps and prisons under authoritarian regimes at many times and in many places in the world. But even if the allusions to the lost fight for freedom are to be read in the context of the Hungarian history, we should not forget that the film was made in a country that only ten years earlier was invaded and its revolution crushed by another neighboring empire - the Soviet Union.

There are several reasons that make the watching of this film a cinematographic experience that is hard to forget. First of all the cinematography. 'The Round-Up' is filmed in black-and-white and the perfect composition of each frame, the dynamic of the movements and the aesthetic expression remind the early films of Ingmar Bergman. The setting is majestic with the horizon of the Hungarian plains visible almost all the time and building a permanent contrast with the concentrationary universe the characters are living in. There is a lot of suffering and there are some hard scenes in the film, but all these are sublimate and the heroes (even the villain ones) seem to keep a trace of dignity at any moment. The dialogs bring to mind Kafka and other writers who brought up in a more or less visible manner the absurd language of the bureaucratic and repressive systems. At the time of its release and more than half of century later 'The Round-Up' stands as a powerful and straggled shout for freedom.

With these early films of Miklós Jancsó (people don't realise he's still making films, with one slated for 2009, and his technique is now totally different) where he shows dehumanised power systems, there's always a dual interest for me. You get the kind of political comment, but you also get the love of nature as a counterpoint, I think one observer noted of the Red and the White, that the main character was the river Volga. Perhaps he's proffering country walks as an alternative to power games, as wise a suggestion as any you'll see in a film.

Anyway in the Round-up we have a whitewashed stockade out on the Hungarian plains. One Count Gedeon Radey has been given the task by the "Apostolic Emperor" of rounding up all the bad sorts, the outlaws. This is back in the late 1800s, we are led to believe that the monarchy has become ignorant and hard-hearted to the populace in the countryside, banditry and revolt foment. Radey interns all these "bad sorts" in the stockade. He wants to find out which of them are undesirables, which he does through a series of psychological games. It's reasonably clear that all the men rounded up aren't ignorant thieves, one for example has travelled extensively and speaks four languages.

It's almost fetishistic the setting, you've got an achingly beautiful shimmering plain of grass that reminded me of when I was a child, strange sensations linked to nature and story-telling. Then you've got all these military men with their advanced piping, tabs, epaulets and sabres. The wild birds are trilling throughout the entire film, except at night when the cicadas chirp. The wind flutters the black feathered cockades on the hats of the officers. You can feel the flaming June heat radiate off the whitewash. Jancso appears to have fetishistically had the sets reconstructed from drawings in historical documents, along with a gibbet that Pasolini would have been proud to display in Salo.

We see for example a man being lead out of solitary confinement, a soldier asks him his name, and the man replies "You already know, Varjù, Bèla" the soldier replies almost lovingly, "Ah yes, Bèla Varjù, you've had many a beating from me haven't you?". Horses ride in circles, men are marched in circles, insanity abounds. The film is basically an exercise in dehumanisation. For me it's not offering much in the way of commentary, unlike the Red and the White which is setting out the aleatory nature of war. The Round-up is perhaps a protest about what went on in the past, an ode to the dead who died for a free Hungary.

The important person in the film is Lajos Kossuth, although you'll never see him. He is one of the famous personages in Hungarian History. He became famous via a series of letters he wrote that were very well received whilst he was a deputy to a Count at the National Diet. He was a liberal of note, he wanted an end to feudalism, and he wanted taxation of the aristocracy, and to remove their right to pass their lands and castles and such like on from one generation to the next without taxation. Anyway he had an interesting life which I'm sure you can read about elsewhere. And his was the spirit of the majority of the interned, although there were brigands too. I think it's key to understand history in the movies of Jancsó, otherwise, in this case you might be led to believe that all the prisoners are simply bad people.

Radey, I believe is only seen once in the film, but he stands against the spirit of Kossuth and behind the "apostolic emperor".

This is not a nasty film in the sense that it doesn't stand up much to the level of horror you would see in a modern exposition on the same subject, or anything like the torture porn of current sensation. That for me I think is a good thing. There is one scene though of terrible evil genius. Every day womenfolk are allowed to come to the stockade and deliver food for the prisoners. One man who is threatened with strangulation unless he turns informant peaches to the authorities that one of the women is in league with a rebel leaders (she is probably his sweetheart). It is arranged for many of the rebels to be sat high atop the stockade wall (perhaps 50ft high). They are then forced to watch this women whipped to death as she runs down a corridor of sadistic soldiers on the open plain. It is too much for three of the men who plunge head first down to their deaths. The techniques of the Radey and his soldiers are ingeniously cruel, they make you complicit in your own demise and the demise of comrades, they bewilder you. It may surprise you that throughout the entire film the soldiers appear almost gentle.

Obviously, essential watching.

The plot description doesn't say it all, by any means. Thundering hooves, veiled and wailing women, desolate landscapes with waving seas of grass and the occasional forbidding stone fortress or burned house, this movie appeals to nearly all of the five senses. It's been three years since I saw it first, and scenes still flash vividly through my head. The harsh faces of the guards, the equally harsh faces of the prisoners. Blunt and brutal deaths. And overhead, the sun burning down, always.