Peter Strickland, 2009, Romania/UK/Hungary 85 mins, in Romanian and Hungarian with subtitles
Cast: Hilda Péter, Tibor Palffy, Norbert Tanko
Review by Mike Bartlett
Katalin Varga is a strange artefact to find turning up in the 21st century, yet in many ways it's a sign of the times. Take its production history, which is of a British filmmaker (Strickland) travelling to Romania to make his first feature; part of a growing diaspora of talent moving away from this island to realise its dreams and ideas elsewhere. Then there's the content: the age-old fable of a woman getting even with the men who raped her. Predictable enough, surely – except that this tale of revenge takes revenge on its revenger...
Katalin (Péter) is a young mother living in a small village. When her husband discovers that she was sexually assaulted many years ago and that the person responsible may be their son's real father. Katalin is forced from her home and sets out on an odyssey to track down her assailant and kill him. As you can imagine, it's a case of a narrative travelling inexorably to a really unpleasant ending. But if this makes Katalin Varga sound of a piece with other contemporary arthouse fare such as Antichrist, then it's a shock to discover that its morality and tone is more old-fashioned, indeed biblical, than its non-mainstream identity would suggest.
Firstly, there's the visual style: the photography has a grainy quality reminiscent of the 1970s, making the landscape, though contemporary, seem far distant, a world preserved in aspic, slightly out-of-reach as in a folk tale or myth. The constant digressions into nature (away from that most immediate signifier of modernity, the city) are accompanied by an extraordinarily exaggerated sound design. As in the work of David Lynch, ordinary aural phenomena become ominous rumbles, portents of things to come.
But it's the film's attitude towards its protagonist that is most disturbing. Because, right from the beginning, it forces the viewer to do something considered more and more abhorrent by the modern liberal mind: to judge. We are introduced to Katalin through other people's eyes, through characters watching her return home across the fields. Then she discovers that her husband is already in possession of knowledge she didn't know was publicly available. It's as though the film is trapping her.
The director, Peter Strickland, stumbles a little after this enigmatic opening and Katalin's peripatetic journey thereafter gets bogged down in indulgent vignettes or portentous frozen images intimating some nebulous sense of menace. But then there is a striking scene where Katalin divulges her story to a couple as they row her down the river (the man being the one who assaulted her in the past). Hilda Péter's superb performance reaches its peak here, and the description of rape in her monologue – both brutally realistic (“I was dry and it burned”) and darkly poetic – may become the last word cinematically on the subject.
This pivotal moment, performed in the flux of a river so as to suggest a soul not at peace and an action not yet over, anchors a film that had previously been adrift. But it also twists the narrative in a new direction. Because the implication is that this is a victim that hasn't come to terms with her fate – she hasn't properly moved on. Whereas her intended target has become a husband and father, has come to terms with his dissolute past, and is indeed treated far more sympathetically.
What we're witnessing here is the clash of Old Testament morality – an eye for an eye – with the New Testament ideal of forgiveness. Thus Katalin Varga is revealed as a deeply religious film, almost reactionary in the way it argues for one spiritual doctrine over another to the point where it takes sides against a rape victim. That such a work should appear in this century and be feted by the cultural cognoscenti of the festival circuit might seem bizarre until we remember that the last two decades has seen an unprecedented rise in influence for the major faiths in the West. Perhaps Katalin Varga, with its almost Victorian mindset, is very much a film of its time after all.
Extras:
There are some interesting extras on the DVD, which will be of particular interest to other would be first time film makers in terms of the background to the film and how it was made. They include a documentary about the making of the film, featuring the actors: interviews with the director and the sound designer; deleted scenes; and two super8 home videos, one about Strickland's late uncle Edward, who was the subject of his early film efforts, and footage with anecdotes from Strickland's voice over about the making of the film in Romania and some of the problems he encountered.
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