The Hungarian Dressmaker

 

Original title: Ema a smrtihlav

Directed by: Iveta Grofová

Country: Slovakia

Length: 129 min.

Year: 2024

Premiere: Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: during the turbulent years of the slovakian puppet state, hungarian Ema finds herself in a difficult situation, between a local guard's avances, an elderly SS officer's presence, and a jewish kid who she's hiding. 

RATING: 3.5/5

 

REVIEW

A film that opens in a chaotic series of sequences, with Ema - portrayed by Alexandra Borbély - walking on the streets of Bratislava accompanying a kid to her mother, and the signs of the rise of the sloavkian fascist puppet state rising around them. A scene spoken in four languages seemlessly, to heighten the confusion, that sets up the atmosphere of complete disorder that the film aims to portray.

The Hungarian Dressmaker describes the hardships of the hungarian minority near the slovakian border during WWII - an entirely peculiar situation in which this group was associated with the jewish community (while simultaneously, Hungary itself was also an antisemthic fascist dictatorship at the time), and persecuted, even if less intensely.

What makes Iveta Grofová's vision stand out from the larger wave of films belonging to this historical context is a continuous balance between realism and metaphor: while most of the film is shot with handheld cameras, in accurately reconstructed rural settings, in a manner that often has been employed for such films, occasionally comes a scene with weird lens distortions, a metaphorical extreme close-up to an insect, or a scene that has more of a fable-like quality to itself, as the one in which Ema teaches a boy to keep his breath underwater. Visually, The Hungarian Dressmaker is pervaded by great imagery, such as the burning barn scene in its entirety, or that shot in the opening sequence in which Ema looks out of the train's window. Its pacing could be excessive for some, especially considering its full two hours length, but is part of the atmosphere that the film tries to create.

A balance that is paired with a minimalistic narration, that hints at Ema's backstory without turning it into a mystery but not even an exaggeratedly appariscent aspect, and that deals similarly with most character relationships. There's at the same time a complexity to the characters that sometimes makes hard to see a stance in the film - an example is the characer of the Slovak officer, of a complex ambivalence in his attitudes that occasionally appears through Michal Ondrik's Performance.

An aspect that perhaps could have been expanded on is the effects and causes of the social divisions: hungarian nationalism-irredentism has often strumentalised the hardships of the persecuted hungarian minority of Slovakia as seen in the film, and still today there is a huge division between slovak and hungaruan communities that has not been resolved entirely. The film does hint at this in the climatic scene of the mass - itself a scene that leads to no solution - but in approaching this complex topic, in its aim to avoid judgements over it ends up overly "super partes" for something that is still as polarising and is strumentalised for very problematic behaviours.

Nonetheless, The Hungarian Dressmaker clearly doesn't have a didactic purpose as much as an ultimate aim of telling a story in an artform - and at that, it is a film with a distinct and purposeful vision, and that is what cinema should be like.