Fekete kefe

In recent years we have seem many slacker movies, about young (mostly) men not going anywhere and not doing anything in particular. Fekete Kefe (Black Brush) is different because it is so beautiful.

It is a beautifully shot, slightly surreal tale about four young men working as chimney sweepers in Budapest. The sun shines, they lay about, have strange conversations with their costumers and are ordered about by their boss. Then their slacker attitude lands them in trouble and they embark on a mission of sorts. They meet a score of weird characters along the way.

All this is accompanied by a fitting soundtrack.

Fekete Keefe is a very different movie, in every possible sense. It is black and white, despite of the fact that it was born in the 21st century. Nearly all of its characters are played by amateur actors. The situations, that occur as we go ahead in the course of the story, are highly realistic and awfully surrealistic at the same time. A strange, sad movie, that was supposed to be a comedy, but tragicomic is the word that suits FK the best. Guys coming from absolutely nowhere, going and arriving to...absolutely nowhere. That's it! Fresh, and new, it worth grade 8. By the way, this film has just won the first prize of the Hungarian Film Festival, and it was definitely one of the bests.

Genres often pose just as many problems as they solve by helping us put a given work of art into a convenient box. Fekete kefe is generally labelled as a comedy, but for me, it's really difficult to say it's a real comedy. There are scenes intended to be funny, all right, but the whole film comes off as a sleepy and lazy stylistic exercise with the black and white image and the frequent use of fixed camera positions.

My main problem with the film is that it wants to have everything an over the top scenario could give, but in the end, it doesn't deliver much. In fact, there are so many possibilities – e.g. a heist film, a somewhat funny social commentary on entrepreneurs and intellectuals doing odd jobs, a study on group dynamics with entirely different characters – but none of them gains dominance over the others. The film is fragmented, the plot is too anecdotal, and the whole thing feels incidental.

Another problem is that, despite being a comedy, the acting is often stiff and borders on boredom and tiredness. It's not even a sort of philosophical calmness – it's just pure boredom on the part of the characters (probably spiced with a sense of powerlessness) and me, too. Furthermore, good comedies have at least a few quotable scenes; here, these are also missing.

All in all, the film is a missed opportunity to me, both stylistically and thematically. It's watchable, but barely memorable.