MVFF33: 'Katalin Varga'

British sound artist and director Peter Strickland's beautiful first feature Katalin Varga is an impressionist film that resonates as much on the aural plane as on any other, so visual cues and plot development get behind what is often simply a powerful mood or feeling-tone signified by sophisticated effects in sound design and musical composition. It is a reversal in the usual order of things which haunts the mind in advance of events, and that implicates viewers in a weird way, weaving images which are spontaneously imagined together with those onscreen. In an interview with The Guardian Peter Strickland speaks frankly of his influences, and there are as many that have traveled through the ear as through the eye, including albums by The Cure and Suicide and the soundtrack (by Popol Vu) for Herzog's Nosferatu as well as films like Night of the Hunter and Paradjanov's Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors.

He speaks at some length as well of how the film came to be made. After suddenly inheriting 25,000 pounds from an uncle, and wondering briefly whether he should use the money to buy a flat, he set out instead for the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to make his first feature film with a crew of 11; the entire script is in Magyar translation, which Strickland doesn't speak but the actors do, so there was a lot of room for improvisation; without real access to the language, his ear was as tuned to the ambient sounds of "goat bells, crickets, and wind" as to human voices. The result is a film that situates human speech and action inside a broader natural context, so that the environment, which is after all the classic vampiric locale, begins to assume agency of its own. Landscape in this film is an obscure and fatalistic protaganist, deeply supernatural.

Hilda Peters plays the title character Katalin, who traverses the country with her young son in search of the men who raped her. Her performance is astonishingly protean, as she morphs from loving mother to trauma victim to seducer to avenger and back in the course of her quest. Her face alone is worth the price of admission. And the incredible face of her nemesis Antal, played by Tibor Palffy, completes the picture. They are profiles carved into opposite sides of the same magical coin. As soon as we see Antal we know - exactly what it is impossible to say - but we are charged with a sense of knowing, of significance, and his role thereafter fulfills this expectation in surprising ways. Pasolini was the great champion of 'real' faces such as these, and Strickland's casting illustrates his point to perfection. The right face carries the full weight of the story, its larger meaning as well as its specific human one.

With its haunting score (by Geoffrey Cox and Steven Stapleton), gorgeous photography (Mark Gyori), lean, intense dramatic arc, and forays into magical thinking and dark, folk-inflected myth, this film is a must-see for lovers of art, of music, and of the supernatural. Plays Smith Rafael 10/8 and 10/15. Also check out Strickland's sound world at http://www.soniccatering.com/. Here's the trailer;