Directed by:
Benedek FliegaufScreenplay:
Benedek FliegaufCinematography:
Zoltán LovasiCast:
Rita Braun, Barbara Csonka, László Cziffer, Gábor Dióssy, Bálint Kenyeres, Edit Lipcsei, Péter Mátyássy, Katalin Mészáros, Péter Pfenig, Lajos Szakács (more)Plots(1)
Everyday stories of the absurd. A complete stranger forces a girl to take his dog, because he wants to commit suicide. Two men keep looking at something battered, steam-razor-washed, mumbling at nights and called Lola. A young father hysterically depicts to the astounded mother that their 10-year-old daughter would become a woman one day and would enter sexual relationship with men, which is overheard by the girl. At the buffet of a ship, two anglers talk about a wels freezed after disastrous death cases. A young man derives his passion for collecting pornos from his upset partner's dead friend. The young pregnant woman agonizes under the control of her dead grandmother's superego. Two girlfriends are looking for a man who annihilated 28 million forints with the shredder and since then has been hiding in the forest... (Mokép)
(more)Reviews (2)
Fliegauf dedicated the film in memoriam to Györgi Fehér, the man with whom he consulted and who (evidently) provided him with huge creative inspiration. Forest is a formally reserved debut consisting of several micro-stories, which are connected above all by a certain hint of derangement. Although the fates of individuals intersect freely one way or another, Fliegauf is interested in the moment of storytelling, the heated dialogue, the purifying monologue, and the eerily fascinating mystery of the human face captured in detail. The film suffers from typical imbalance - some of the stories are brilliant (a random father lamenting the estrangement of his daughter and, above all, a totally creepy monologue by a semi-sleeping girl about an overbearing grandmother), but others are more of a literary construct (two boys talking over an invisible object). Fliegauf's ability to hypnotize the viewer and seize the world in front of the camera in his own way is already evident in Forest. It cannot be said that the Hungarian improved afterwards - each of his films is an island on its own.
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Forest is a visually tantalizing mosaic of short story dialogues, or rather monologues, of characters whose inner worlds somehow depart from the norm. I see the whole thing as a dramatic study of human alienation and the inability to listen to ourselves in the everyday mummery around us. I was attracted by the imaginative camera work, which is almost hypnotic at times. I also liked the seemingly casually executed yet masterfully crafted ending.
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