Visually dazzling flight of fancy
Dir Kornél Mundruczó Starring Merab Ninidze, Zsombor Jéger, György Cserhalmi, Mónika Balsai
Take the classic Chuck Jones cartoon about the frog who sings ragtime, cross it with Richard Donner’s first Superman film, dump the results in the middle of the Syrian refugee crisis and light the fuse. Congratulations: you may have just re-enacted the game of fourdimensional cognitive hopscotch that led to Kornél Mundruczó’s new film.
This politically charged superhero parable is less a case of the Hungarian director pulling out all the stops than hooking up the pipe organ in his village church to a nuclear reactor: it is an outrageously ambitious and intermittently staggering piece of work, though it completely lacks the kind of discipline or focus that might have made its themes or images stick.
It opens on the fringe of present-day Europe, where hundreds of displaced Syrian souls are crammed into lorries rumbling towards the Hungarian border. One of the passengers is Aryan (Zsombor Jéger), who makes a floundering scramble for freedom but is shot by a Liam Neeson-like border enforcer (György Cserhalmi). Aryan drops to the ground – then suddenly, his body is borne aloft and starts revolving madly in the air. Far from dead, he has become super-human – or perhaps divinely turbo-charged.
A corrupt doctor called Stern (Merab Ninidze), who works at the refugee camps in a kind of unofficial penance for a tragic past misdeed, smells opportunity, and smuggles Aryan into Budapest, where he touts him as an angel to superstitious patients who are prepared to pay big money for a close encounter with the miraculous.
As Aryan dutifully levitates, his arms stretched wide in benediction, Stern’s clients crane their necks in wonder, and Mundruczó’s camera follows suit. (The budget was a snug €4 million, which means the special effects defy belief twice over.) All Aryan wants is to be reunited with his father, whom he lost on the border, but his Svengali has other plans – while business is good.
From the involved and blatant central Christian allegory to the title’s more diffuse cosmic resonance – the moon in question is the iceencrusted Europa, which the film’s prologue suggests could be a “cradle of new life forms” – there is an entire marching band of metaphors parping and honking away here, and the racket soon becomes unbearable. Reconcile yourself to the fact that the thematic loose ends are never going to be sensibly tied up, though, and it’s possible to coast through the entire film on its unflagging visual bravado alone.
If your first instinct is to wonder who on earth comes up with this stuff, the answer is Kata Wéber, who also wrote Mundruczó’s White God, a 2014 parable that was basically Spartacus with stray dogs. That earlier film didn’t mince its allegories either, but it had a sinewy sense of purpose that’s frustratingly absent here. RC