Péter Bacsó has died at 81. The legendary director and screenwriter was best known for directing satires and dramas of the Rákosi-Satalinist excesses visited upon the average Hungarian during the dark years of the communist era.
A glance at Bacsó's career shows that he was much more than the one-trick pony director of cult film touchstones. Beginning as an assistant director on Hungary's first postwar film of importance,
Valahol Europaban (Somewhere in Europe), he found work as a script editor and screenwriter in the early 1950s, moving his way up to director in 1960 with
Útinapló (Travel Diary).
After a handful of directorial efforts in the 60s including
Nyár a Hegyen (Summer on the Mountain, 1967), a yarn about a group who want to turn a former quarry's detention camp into an artist's colony, he made his signature work,
A Tanú.
A Tanú a.k.a.
The Witness is a broad farce that looks to have been produced on a budget comparable with a western cult film - though the production values created an atmosphere very much in tune with the surreal nature of the film. The story concerns a Hungarian everyman who, after a chance encounter with an old friend who has a prestigious position in the communist party, becomes a pawn in a Kafkaesque power game. He is given plum jobs in return for future obligations that will require him to be a witness against his old friend in a party show trial.
Coincidentally, the pacing, mood and deadpan humor of
The Witness is much like that of a famous American underground comedy made in the same year, Robert Downey Sr.'s notorious
Putney Swope. The humor of these films, very controversial in their respective countries upon release, is applied to their intended targets with all the subtlety of a fire axe tearing apart a roomful of cheap furniture. This is the charm of both of them, and why
The Witness was banned by the government and unseen by the general public until 10 years after it's release.
Following the suppression of
A Tanú, Bacsó resumed screenwriting duties to adapt Tibor Déry's novel for another film regarded as a Hungarian classic -
Karoly Makk's masterwork,
Szerelem (Love, 1971).
Bacsó remained prolific as a director into the 1980s, directing on average a film per year until drifting into TV work in the mid-90s. A standout from his later period is
Sztálin Menyasszonya (Stalin's Bride, 1991), a period piece set in the Soviet Union circa 1937. The story concerns a mentally disabled woman who wanders into a rural Russian village and attracts the scrutiny of the local KGB by way of cruel a whisper campaign of the locals.
Into the 21st century Bacsó worked with he biggest stars of modern Hungarian cinema such as Szábo Gyözo in the comedy
De Kik Azok a Lumnitzer Nővérek? (Who are the Luminitzer Sisters?, 2006).
So with the international situation intensifying, we raise
a glass of 6 puttonyos to remember
Bacsó Péter and to also remember:
Life is not just cream cakes, comrade!
