Taxidermia
Directed by György Pálfi
At Cinema Village
Runtime: 91 min.
It’s not surprising that it has taken three years for Hungarian writer/director Gyorgy Pálfi’s simultaneously gorgeous and repulsive Taxidermia to be released in America. A blisteringly unhinged post-Soviet fantasia, it defies contextualization, as it doesn’t take place within any normative sense of time or place. Starting with the death of the eldest of three generations of men and revolving around the carnivalesque celebration of the body in various states of abuse, the film resembles something of a Vonnegut allegory put through a cinematic chamber of horrors.
Pálfi’s magically realistic narrative is so absorbed by the cyclical corruption of its protagonists’ bodies that its narrative is only cursorily set on Planet Earth, let alone Hungary. Filmed with a dense palette of colors that emulate over-ripe fruit and cured meat, it starts during what can only be retrospectively identified as WW II, with the eldest of three key figures in the Morosgovanyi clan. A jittery, sex-starved soldier, he actively lusts for the curvy folds of decadent noblewomen behind closed doors and through wooden planks. His bulbous son comes next, a Soviet-era competitive “speed-eater” who has his eye on an equally rotund female competitor when he’s not barfing up soup and jellied meats. After him, is the father’s skeletal taxidermist son, whose disgust for his own flesh will lead him to turn his needle and thread on himself.
By the time Pálfi begins the youngest Morosgovanyi’s narrative, Taxidermia’s gnarled skein of a plot has blasted well away into unfamiliar territory that can only be understood sensually. The climactic scene is stunning in its manic attention to experiential detail. Pálfi’s skill at making something as churlishly repulsive as a scene of self-mummification completely mesmerizing is a testament to his unparalleled dedication to imaginary grotesques.
Directed by György Pálfi
At Cinema Village
Runtime: 91 min.
It’s not surprising that it has taken three years for Hungarian writer/director Gyorgy Pálfi’s simultaneously gorgeous and repulsive Taxidermia to be released in America. A blisteringly unhinged post-Soviet fantasia, it defies contextualization, as it doesn’t take place within any normative sense of time or place. Starting with the death of the eldest of three generations of men and revolving around the carnivalesque celebration of the body in various states of abuse, the film resembles something of a Vonnegut allegory put through a cinematic chamber of horrors.
Pálfi’s magically realistic narrative is so absorbed by the cyclical corruption of its protagonists’ bodies that its narrative is only cursorily set on Planet Earth, let alone Hungary. Filmed with a dense palette of colors that emulate over-ripe fruit and cured meat, it starts during what can only be retrospectively identified as WW II, with the eldest of three key figures in the Morosgovanyi clan. A jittery, sex-starved soldier, he actively lusts for the curvy folds of decadent noblewomen behind closed doors and through wooden planks. His bulbous son comes next, a Soviet-era competitive “speed-eater” who has his eye on an equally rotund female competitor when he’s not barfing up soup and jellied meats. After him, is the father’s skeletal taxidermist son, whose disgust for his own flesh will lead him to turn his needle and thread on himself.
By the time Pálfi begins the youngest Morosgovanyi’s narrative, Taxidermia’s gnarled skein of a plot has blasted well away into unfamiliar territory that can only be understood sensually. The climactic scene is stunning in its manic attention to experiential detail. Pálfi’s skill at making something as churlishly repulsive as a scene of self-mummification completely mesmerizing is a testament to his unparalleled dedication to imaginary grotesques.
