Hungary
4*
Director:
Péter Bacsó
Screenwriters:
Péter Bacsó
János Újhegyić
Director of Photography:
János Zsombolyai
Running time: 103 minutes
Original title: A tanú
József Pelikán, by his own admission, is “ideologically ill-defined”, in spite of his affiliation with the Communist Party; he is a continuous victim of circumstance. All he really cares about is the dyke next to his house, where he does his best to keep the gophers from burrowing and destroying this wall that protects him and his family against the slowly rising level of water. And rise it does, in the end providing the inevitable tragedy in this tragicomedy.
In one of the film’s opening scenes (incidentally, one of the only instances when Pelikán deliberately defies the law of the land), he slaughters a pig in the basement while his children, standing on the trapdoor above, sing at the top of their lungs. Such an activity – the killing, not the singing – is illegal under law, and soon enough, by way of more misunderstandings, Pelikán is arrested and thrown in jail.
Very quickly, the film’s structure becomes a chain of predictable causality: He is thrown in jail, let out almost immediately, given a job by a Party senior, he fails to respect someone high up and is thrown in jail again. But the situations themselves are comedic gems. Pelikán is appointed as director of a swimming pool, director of an amusement park and director of an orange research institute but fails to impress.
However, the Orange Research Institute provides one of the funniest banners in the film, visible during a ceremony supposed to celebrate the success of the Hungarian Orange: “Forward with the Hungarian Orange!”
This film is one of those Communist-era comedies that clearly poke fun at the regime and still astound by virtue of having been made in such a political climate in the first place. In particular, I’m thinking of a Polish film called Miś, by Stanisław Bareja. The Witness is less overtly laughable, but there is a lot to laugh at, and this laughter is often derived from the hilarious absurdity of the main character’s ignorance of and disregard for the power structures.
A Witness is a grand farce, and the one character’s recurring reminder that “life is not a whipped-cream cake” might not be as poetic or optimistic as Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, but it makes clear what the characters should not be expecting.
The use of communist slogans in the film is striking and comical and can still be easily comprehended by a contemporary audience. Also, there is no difficulty in understanding the subtext of the episode about the Hungarian oranges. The last part of the story is handled well and contains one or two interesting surprises, which the episodic nature of the film up to that point had sought to conceal.