Studies in Eastern European Cinema

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Conflicting forces: post-communist and mythical

bodies in Kornél Mundruczó's films

Lóránt Stőhr

To cite this article: Lóránt Stőhr (2016) Conflicting forces: post-communist and mythical
bodies in Kornél Mundruczó's films, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 7:2, 139-152, DOI:
10.1080/2040350X.2016.1155264

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2016.1155264

Published online: 20 Apr 2016.

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 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA, 2016
VOL. 7, NO. 2, 139 152
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2016.1155264

Conflicting forces: post-communist and mythical bodies in

l Mundruczo
Korne
’s films


hr

r
ant Sto
Lo
University of Theatre and Film Arts, Institute of Theatre and Film Theory, Budapest, Hungary
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ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Postmodernist narrative styles and thematic approaches Hungarian cinema; Korn
el
encouraged by poststructuralist discourses appeared in Hungarian Mundrucz
o; body
film culture after 2000 with the emergence of a new generation of representation; mythical
filmmakers. Despite their breakthrough in national and narrative; masculinity
international art-house circles, however, the films of these directors
did not bring about a profound renewal in gender politics or
representations of the body. This article will analyse how different
artistic and cultural impulses clash in the representation of the body
in contemporary Hungarian cinema. This conflict is demonstrated in
Korn
el Mundruczo
’s work, who was the most promising newcomer
in terms of an innovative representation of the body and gender
issues, and who is still one of the most successful members of this
generation on the festival and art-house circuit. This article argues
that Mundruczo
’s work has two different phases: in the first, gender
issues are represented in a sociological context and evoke culturally
specific bodily experiences; while in the second, characters are
portrayed in a more universal context and the human body is
utilized more emphatically as a metaphor. The change in style and
bodily representation will be demonstrated by analysing two
feature films from the first period and one from the second stage of
Mundruczo
’s career.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, new Hungarian cinema maintained its international rec-
ognition mainly by universalizing the social experience of the country and the post-com-
munist region. The universalizing approach of Hungarian film tradition held a strong
appeal for younger directors (such as Gy€orgy P
alfi, Bence Fliegauf, Szabolcs Hajdu and


Agnes Kocsis), who also attempted to experiment with new aesthetic paths. Despite their
breakthrough in national and international art-house circles, however, the films of these
directors did not bring about a profound renewal in gender politics or representations of
the body. Some have even argued that the latest and most prestigious Hungarian auteur
films reflect an even more sexist and dated mindset than their predecessors (Havas 2011,
41). The reason for their contradictory body politics might be found in the relative cul-
tural backwardness of Hungary. Feminist and queer discourses on gender and body poli-
tics have only vaguely and slowly spread in Hungarian society and culture after the

hr
CONTACT L
or
ant Sto stohr.lorant@szfe.hu

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

 140

HR
L. STO

political transformation. As Pachmanov
a has stated, ‘the first decade after 1989 was per-
meated with distrust toward gender and feminist issues’ in art in general, and it is only in
the past 10 years that many Eastern European artists and theorists have become more
explicitly ‘gender- and feminism-conscious’ (Pachmanov
a 2010, 42). The new generation
of filmmakers in Hungary was largely brought up in the communist era and may have
encountered these new discourses only later in their careers.
This article will analyse how different artistic and cultural impulses clash in the repre-
sentation of the body in Hungarian cinema. I will demonstrate this conflict in Korn
el
Mundrucz
o’s work, who was the most promising newcomer in terms of an innovative
representation of the body and gender issues, and who is still one of the most successful
members of this generation on the festival and art-house circuit. I argue that Mundrucz
o’s
work has two different phases: in the first, gender issues are represented in a sociological
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context and evoke culturally specific bodily experiences, while in the second, characters
are portrayed in a more universal context and the human body is utilized more emphati-
cally as a metaphor. In his first two films, Mundrucz
o represents his characters as they
struggle with their conflicting body images, and live their contested sexuality, in a way
that is strongly linked to the unique social and economic situation of post-communist
Hungary. Mundrucz
o encourages the viewer to experience and understand the characters’
lived bodies in a phenomenological way. As Iris Young explains, ‘the lived body is a uni-
fied idea of a physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural context; it
is body-in-situation’ (Young 2005, 16). Inspired by phenomenological existentialism,
Young suggests that (feminist) theory should deal with one’s facticity, that is, the ‘concrete
material relations of a person’s bodily experience and her physical and social environ-
ment’ (Young 2005, 16) The characterization and representation in Mundrucz
o’s early
films partly correspond to the demand of phenomenological approaches to the body, but
frame it through the concern with power and sexuality. The focus on the unique experi-
ence of the individual’s body, however, diminished in Mundrucz
o’s work after Sz
ep
napok/Pleasant Days (2002). As he turned to universal and mythical narratives with their
traditionally coded gender models and engendered physical acts, the body became more
explicitly a semiotic or a formal device. The two most conspicuous bodily experiences in
these films, sexuality and physical suffering, are coded in accordance with the dichotomy
of the (hetero)normative and transgressive practices in patriarchal society. The two differ-
ent approaches to the body in Mundrucz
o’s oeuvre may reflect the inner conflict of post-
communist Hungarian cinema and society. I will demonstrate the change in style and
bodily representation by analysing two feature films from the first period and one from
the second stage of Mundrucz
o’s career.

’s career
Mundruczo
Korn
el Mundrucz
o started his career with a thematic emphasis on the split identities of
young protagonists rooted in severed family ties, crises of sexuality and sexual identity,
and the social problems of post-communist countries caused by the contradiction
between the new consumerist urge and the lack of adequate financial resources. In his first
two feature films, Mundrucz
o used specific local sets, contemporary design, a very vivid
colour-scheme, dynamic camerawork and colloquial language full of vulgarisms and
puns. As a trained actor and a practising theatre director, theatrical stylization appealed
 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 141

to him in his early films, which was manifested in the dialogue, the acting and the mise-
en-scene.
A radical turn occurred in Mundrucz
o’s oeuvre in around 2004 when he largely left
contemporary scenes and characters behind and started working with mythological
motifs, universal themes and a style reminiscent of B
ela Tarr’s cinema, as exemplified by
Johanna (2005), Delta (2008) and Szel
ıd teremt
es A Frankenstein terv/Tender Son
(2010). Yvette B
ır
o’s influence on the young director can be detected behind this change.
The Hungarian essayist, scriptwriter and ex-professor of the New York University film
programme claims in her book, Profane Mythology, that cinema generalizes everyday sto-
ries with the help of myths (B
ır
o 1982). The collaboration between Mundrucz
o and B
ır
o
started in Johanna, and, from 2004 to 2013, she was the co-author of the film scripts and
theatre adaptations directed by Mundrucz
o. Under B
ır
o’s influence Mundrucz
o started
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using myths as the basis of his scripts.

After this change, Mundrucz
o’s career quickly developed via the international festival
circuit. Since Johanna his films have been invited to the Cannes film festival, where Delta
won the Fipresci prize in 2008. His next film in a similar style, Tender Son, was also in
competition in Cannes in 2010. In both Delta and Tender Son, Mundrucz
o worked under
the influence of B
ela Tarr in respect of the slow, contemplative camerawork and the
abstraction of real East-European locations, with the aim of adding a universal dimension
to his stories. Mundrucz
o’s real success came after and presumably owing to his turn
to universalist storytelling and the partial appropriation of Tarr’s style.

’s early films
Post-communist bodies in Mundruczo
Male homosexuality had barely been represented in Hungarian cinema (Murai and T
oth,
2011, 69) before Mundrucz
o created his first ultra-low-budget feature film, Nincsen nekem
v
agyam semmi/This I Wish and Nothing More, in 1999. This film portrays the male pro-
tagonist’s body as the site of his erotic and physical power, which turns into a site of self-
contempt and pain. Bruno lives in destitution in his countryside house and works secretly
as a male prostitute in Budapest. The harsh reality of prostitution pursued under financial
compulsion in Budapest on the one hand, and the heterosexual love experienced with his
wife Mari and dreams about their being circus stars on the international scene on the
other, gradually splits his personality.
The political and economic transition in post-communist Hungary challenged hege-
monic masculinity. In the communist era, the Hungarian proletariat suffered from exploi-
tation by the state; however, male workers were generally able to maintain dominant
forms of masculinity owing to surviving patriarchal practices. Dariusz Galasi
nski has ana-
lysed masculinity in the context of gender ideology in post-communist Poland. According
to his findings, when men lost their jobs and could not find new positions in traditional
male professions as a consequence of the economic transformation after 1989, they lived
this crisis as an assault against their masculinity. ‘Post-communism seems to challenge
masculinity and demand that it more or less explicitly finds its way within it’ (Galasi
nski
2010, 259). I posit that his main assertions are also relevant in Hungary among working-
class males who, as in Poland, lost their jobs in heavy industry and agricultural co-opera-
tives in great numbers. As Galasi
nski has shown, the fear of unemployment after many
 142

HR
L. STO

decades of economic stability strongly influenced many men in the adaptation of their
masculinities to the new social circumstances.
The interaction between masculinity and the political economic transformation is
exemplified in This I Wish and Nothing More as its protagonist faces the difficulties in cre-
ating his masculinity. Bruno belongs to a new post-communist working class, which has
to find new methods to construct a unique masculinity that is opposed to the previous
practices under socialism. Paradoxically, he can adjust to the social image of dominant
masculinity (such as achievement) in his home village only by sacrificing it and accepting
the position of subordinate masculinity in other significant areas of his life. Bruno com-
mutes between a typical crisis-ridden rural region of Hungary and the big multicultural
city where he works as a homosexual prostitute. As Connell asserts, gay masculinity has
very often been represented as a ‘subordinated masculinity’ (Connell 1995, 79). In the spe-
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cific context of Hungary, Tak
acs shows in her exploration that ‘social acceptance of LGBT
people is in inverse proportion with their social visibility’ (Tak
acs et al. 2012, 87); as the
most ‘visible’ homosexual men in Hungarian public space, gay prostitutes in particular
are frequently faced with social contempt.
Bruno confronts the post-communist form of hegemonic masculinity in Budapest in
the guise of a rich middle-aged client, who is, however, hiding his homosexuality in order
to maintain his image of renowned lawyer, caring husband and good father to two chil-
dren. When Bruno visits him at his expensive suburban house, the young protagonist is
afforded an insight into the bright side of his client’s life and the material expression of
the privileged position of hegemonic masculinity in society. Bruno must realize that
because of his social background he cannot achieve this privileged position and will
remain subordinated as a male in Hungarian society forever. In order to reduce his cogni-
tive dissonance, Bruno claims that he is a heterosexual man who works as a male prosti-
tute exclusively for money and does not accept the accusation of being bisexual despite
the fact that he sometimes fulfils the sexual desires of his brother-in-law and colleague for
free. His assertion of heteronormativity takes Bruno unconsciously closer to the appar-
ently desirable position of hegemonic masculinity.
Bruno and Mari seem to experience emotional closeness and bodily intimacy in their
home. Their young, strong and flexible bodies could be the basis for their rise both in a
social and physical sense, if they were to succeed in performing their experimental circus
act on a hang-glider. Their failure compels Bruno to step out of their carnal bond recur-
rently, which poses a challenge to both their love and Bruno’s heterosexual identity. The
illusory village idyll is recurrently threatened by the representative of the city in the film,
Ringo, Mari’s homosexual brother and Bruno’s colleague, who attempts to insert himself
(even physically, in bed) into the couple’s bond. In part due to Ringo’s frequent presence,
Bruno cannot maintain the separation of heterosexual love and homosexual work but it is
impossible for him to admit same-sex activity and claim bisexual identity in the given
social circumstances.
Bruno’s attractive body exerts a powerful appeal on other people, both male and
female. It affords him self-esteem but it gradually becomes the site of his sufferings
and humiliation, as it becomes more frequently possessed by other people for financial
reasons or power. Mundrucz
o gives an insight into Bruno’s ambiguous bodily experi-
ence in the scene at the police station where two police women, who are interrogating
him, force him in reality or perhaps in Bruno’s fantasy to perform a Chippendale
 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 143

show for them. Bruno sits humiliated in the dark and listens to the music played on
the radio for a while but as the non-diegetic music starts and a stage spotlight is
directed on him, he comes into motion in an increasingly dynamic and sexually sug-
gestive way. The actor’s performance provides an erotic spectacle: he offers his bottom
to the female gaze for some moments and shakes his muscular body self-confidently
in a quick-paced dance. Consequently, the policewomen represent both the excessive
masculine and feminine response to Bruno’s body and his performance. One of them
gives a parodic performance of masculinity by wildly moving her truncheon as an arti-
ficial penis, the other takes off her uniform and starts dancing in a comedic mimicry
of a sexually aroused state.
Mundrucz
o generally avoids portraying sexual intercourse and other types of sexual
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behaviour explicitly. The one and only erotic scene which refers directly to sexual inter-
course takes place between Bruno and the rich lawyer. This scene shows the protagonist’s
emotional arousal caused by homosexual activity in the most direct way. Bruno, an orphan,
has a father son-like emotional relationship with the lawyer. He expects care and affection
from this fatherly figure but at the same time he is forced to behave as his lover for eco-
nomic reasons. The sex scene is composed of static, almost frozen shots and fragmented
movements that express Bruno’s passivity, caused by the contradiction between financial
need and self-respect, between the objectification of his body and longing for love. Contra-
dictions between the voice and the image run throughout the scene. The almost naked law-
yer slowly undresses Bruno, who reluctantly gives his body to the older man while
simultaneously threatening him in his internal monologue. When the lawyer removes Bru-
no’s pants, the young man is talking about his wish to make love to his wife. Later, he
speaks about his parents and his abandonment while his body is curled up in a foetal posi-
tion. The composition of the scene expresses Bruno’s mental disintegration and the alien-
ation from his own body while he speaks about himself slowly falling apart.
Mundrucz
o does not depict the sexual act graphically but he shows its aftermath.
Bruno starts crying while he is washing his bottom in the cold-looking blue bathroom.
The erotic scene and its aftermath partly reveal the protagonist’s feelings towards physical
penetration, which he sees as threatening to his masculinity and identity. Bruno does not
let anybody enter his own psyche he shares his feelings and secrets neither with his
wife nor his male lovers but he must allow his clients to penetrate his body. For Bruno,
as for a member of a homophobic, patriarchal, phallocentric society, passive anal sex is
virtually equal to self-rejection, and a threat to his personhood is enhanced by the contra-
dictory gender roles that the intersecting desires develop.
The protagonist tries to maintain his dominant masculinity at home as compensation
for the incessant humiliation suffered as a gay prostitute in the city. His growing jealousy
and aggression towards his wife overcompensates for his weakened sense of masculinity.
The physical and spiritual alienation from his wife, interpreted as sexual impotence,
evolves as a consequence of his social defencelessness. Bruno projects an imaginary rich
Budapest-based rival who makes love to his wife and makes her pregnant while he has to
work as a homosexual prostitute, without any hope of leaving the village house and the
poverty-ridden country. The ultimate ‘proof’ of Bruno’s virility is lost due to Mari’s secret
abortion, which is motivated by economic and emotional reasons. Bruno’s jealousy erupts
into rage in the very moment that Mari ventures to ask him about his work. He makes a
desperate and brutal attempt to embody a phallocentric male identity by imposing his
 144

HR
L. STO

physical power on Mari, and in the end he stabs a knife in her vagina as a substitute for his
penis. The deliberately vicious repetition of the experience of the abortion constitutes his
revenge for the imaginary loss of his masculinity and his impotence experienced as a
result of the failure of the couple’s circus performances. His brutal and irrational attempt
at the imagined restoration of his masculinity is the climax of the sexual, emotional and
existential confusion that overwhelms him. The mise-en-scene of the melodramatic end-
ing of the story refers forward to the universalizing compositions of Mundrucz
o’s later
films. Repeated framings depicting Mari’s body tainted with blood while she is holding
Bruno’s murdered body in tableaux vivants are reminiscent of the iconography of the
Pieta, which will recur in the later films.
This I Wish and Nothing More shows the fatal consequences of the challenge posed by
the cultural economic transformation to traditional concepts of masculinity. In this film,
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Mundrucz
o critically represents the heteronormative masculine attitudes of the characters

as embedded in the sociological realities of post-communist Hungary, which ‘still belongs
to those homophobic societies where the acceptance of the freedom of lesbian and gay
lifestyles is not at all well developed’ (Tak
acs et al. 2012, 80). He portrays a male protago-
nist who is not able to admit his bisexuality as an answer to his various sexual and emo-
tional attachments as he experiences the homophobic Hungarian society’s hostile attitude
towards queerness and the new proletariat.
Mundrucz
o further analyses gender issues in the poverty-ridden countryside of Hun-
gary through the developing bodies and identities of adolescent boys and girls in his next
film, Pleasant Days. The main characters are petty criminals driven by their harsh eco-
nomic interest and immediate carnal desire without the need of any other (social, spiri-
tual, etc.) values. The female and male protagonists, lower class orphans, are exposed
particularly violently to the socio-economic forces of the wild capitalism of post-commu-
nist society due to their youth.
Mundrucz
o shifts his attention in this film from a conflicted, strong male body to a
conflicted, vulnerable female one. Maya is a teenage mother without any parental support
or advanced educational background, and she finds her economic survival in the support
of the prevailing patriarchal power. By being dependent on male economic and social sup-


port, she has to struggle with three men’s desires: her adolescent ex-lover (Akos), her adult
lover (J
anos), who ‘keeps’ her as his mistress, and another adolescent boy (P
eter) who is
discharged from a young offenders’ institution at the beginning of the film. The teenage
girl is constantly stared at and insulted by all three men as an expression of their male
chauvinism and as an exertion of their power. Maya is exposed to P
eter’s intrusive male
gaze during her sexual activity and in the most intimate moment of giving birth to her
child. In a later scene, all the three male protagonists look at her with a lustful gaze while
she performs an erotic dance. The actress’s performance expresses the switching between
her different personas. She begins dancing solely for herself as an act of self-indulgence
but when she turns to her male spectators she starts smiling ambiguously and her move-
ments become more conscious. Maya’s smile expresses that she is aware of the power of
her body. Her quick transformation from an adolescent girl to the imitation of an erotic
dancer indicates the performed nature of her femininity.
In the phallocentric community depicted in the film, men assert their masculinity by
the physical possession of the desired woman. Through his forced kisses and embraces,
J
anos seeks to demonstrate that he possesses the girl as a sexual object. Nevertheless, his
 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 145
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Figure 1. Pleasant days: bondage sex with Maya.

aggressive kisses, his impatient movements and his facial expression hint at the uncer-
tainty and fragility of his masculinity. He tries to maintain the social image of the decent
family man and businessman, although he can only provide for his family and maintain
Maya as his mistress by committing crimes such as car theft. J
anos desperately attempts
to express his power over the girl and his male employees by sexual harassment and sadis-
tic bondage sex (Figure 1). Maya, a small girl in a fragile social position, is unable to
defend herself physically against sexual abuse. The actress’s face expresses various emo-
tions during forced sex, such as physical pain, a sense of humiliation, desperation and
contempt for her torturer; to some extent, her passive physical position is juxtaposed with
her active emotions, thus exemplifying the exercise of dissociation.
Maddy Coy emphasizes the possible negative consequences of prostitution for the emo-
tional life and body image of prostitutes. ‘An overwhelming feature of the women’s accounts
of selling sex was the separation of self from body and the need to distance the thinking,
feeling self from the physical body’ (Coy 2009, 194). Although Maya is not a prostitute per
se, she does trade sex for economic support, and also suffers from this bodily dissociation
when her body is used for sex. Her every attempt to regain control over her body is pun-
ished by men. For example, when she runs away from J
anos and would like to receive some


tenderness from Akos, the father of her child, he also forces her to have sex, attempting to
prove his masculinity by possessing Maya in a similar way that J
anos did. Eventually, when
J
anos throws her out of the flat in revenge for her infidelity, Maya tries to regain authority
over her body. She rejects P
eter, who also wants to possess her after his two rivals have dis-
appeared from the scene. Maya’s remaining self-respect is entirely ruined when P
eter rapes
her at the end of the film. Maya is forced to give in to his carnal desire because she relies on
P
eter’s help to retrieve her baby. The girl finds herself again in a psychologically and socially
vulnerable position, as she was with J
anos and Akos
previously. She kisses him impassively
as if she has ‘paid a deposit’ for P
eter’s services as her witness in the legal battle for her
baby. When P
eter realizes that he cannot receive Maya’s love, he rapes her in an act of
 146

HR
L. STO

power and aggression. The camera revolves around the bodies in upsetting close-ups. Ulti-
mately, the two teenagers, both from poor social and family backgrounds, fail in their aim
to break out of the hopelessness of the small town, and Maya in particular is violently
exposed to the prevailing patterns of masculine behaviour that characterizes this society.
In Pleasant Days, the human body is the place of expression for still-forming identities,
and the object of self-examination through which characters try to understand themselves.
Both the male and the female protagonist inspect their own bodies in order to understand
their troubled personalities. The adolescent boy and girl struggle with their identities,
caught between childhood and adulthood. On the one hand, P
eter’s sister regards him as
a child, so they are not ashamed of their own bodies in each other’s company: they bathe
naked together, fight with each other playfully and she washes his body as his surrogate
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mother. They enjoy bodily contact without a hint of incestuous sexual desire, although
M
aria must have recognized the maturity of P
eter’s body. When P
eter stands up from the
toilet, M
aria’s gaze is implied by a close-up that shows his penis partly covered by a pair
of boxing gloves. On the other hand, when P
eter returns from the offenders’ institution
for armed robbery, he asserts his adulthood both to his sister and his friend on the basis
of his pubic hair and grown penis. He and Akos
measure and compare the length of their
penises in a dark car, complicit in what they perceive as the secret of manliness.
Maya also suffers from an identity crisis. The film presents her body image and bodily
experiences within their own social and psychological complexity. Maya is an orphan, a
teenage girl, a mistress and a mother simultaneously, and despite her ability for quick
behavioural adaptation to given situations she cannot change her bodily experience alto-
gether. She gives birth to a child at the beginning of the film but she sells the baby imme-
diately to P
eter’s older sister and behaves like a ‘normal’ adolescent girl again. Maya
desperately attempts to gain back her prenatal self and body. Although this attitude is not
confined to girls of her age, adolescent mothers are frequently pressured to restore their
bodies to their pre-pregnancy state. Stapleton’s research, for example, asserts that in the
early postnatal period ‘most [teenage girls] were desperate to reclaim and to reinscribe
their bodies as “not pregnant”’ (Stapleton 2010, 150). For Maya, reclaiming her previous
figure has importance for economic reasons (so that J
anos will continue to financially sup-
port her), but her body keeps reminding her of her motherhood because she has to
express milk regularly. She scrutinizes her body, asking her friend whether she has a
mother’s ‘big’ or a teenage girl’s ‘small’ vulva. The female friend caresses Maya’s mons
veneris and kneels down to see it from a short distance before she makes her judgement.
Both male and female adolescent friends look at each other’s genitals without any shame,


but while P
eter and Akos compete against each other on the length of their penises, Maya
and her friend praise the appearance of the other’s vagina. The two scenes thus emphasize
the difference in stereotypical gender models: masculinity is aggressive and competitive,
whereas femininity is supportive and affirmative.
The body functions as a means of communication; Mundrucz
o depicts a materially,
mentally and spiritually deprived community, in which people are not able to express
themselves adequately and thus use their bodies as a substitute for language. Mundrucz
o
regards the confined space of his films as a stage where the frustrated characters express
their lack of freedom and interact with each other through aggressive, hostile body move-
ments and rough touches. For example, when P
eter returns home and meets Akos
for the
first time after being released from the young offenders’ institution, instead of talking to
each other they start fighting. The adolescent boys’ intimacy and friendship is expressed
 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 147

not by words but rather by aggressive movements. Their short conversations are punctu-
ated with rough and vulgar expressions; they do not have words of affection. The male
protagonist also expresses his frustration with his body. P
eter often paces up and down
menacingly when he feels frustrated or he throws objects as an outlet for his tension. The
effect of his aggressive behaviour is enhanced by the dynamic camera work, which imi-
tates his angry movements in order to provoke a similar restlessness in the viewer. P
eter
and Maya’s conversations are counterpointed by the contact of their bodies. Their repeti-
tive conversations do not lead to a compromise but a total breakdown in communication,
which is violently embodied by the rape.
In this section I have attempted to show how, in his early films, Mundrucz
o presents
the body as conditioned by the specific socio-economic situation of post-communist Hun-
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gary. He represents the culture of machismo and rigid gender roles together with a sharp
criticism of the financial and mental poverty of contemporary Hungarian society.
Mundrucz
o’s first two feature films are significant in the way they present lived bodies.
Homo- and heterosexual prostitution, teenage motherhood, rape and aggression are not
only symbolic acts in the story; the characters’ ways of experiencing their bodies is an inte-
gral element of characterization.

Turning to mythical narratives

In around 2004, Mundrucz
o changed the narrative style, visual design and soundtrack of
his films. He shifted the emphasis from socially and psychologically ‘realistic’ character-
izations to mythical references, elevating interpersonal conflicts and individual problems
to a universal level. This is not to say that he entirely neglected sociopolitical circumstan-
ces or normative Western gender models but, by referring to old Greek, biblical or roman-
tic popular myths, he began to represent gender roles as essential and natural with few
hints at their social construction.
In Delta, the mythical connotations of the story are interwoven with, and at times over-
write, its Balkan setting and representation of cultural stereotypes. The presence of the
mythical is amplified by withholding narrative information as well as by the style (iconic
compositions, elegant photography, sublime violin music played by the performer who
acts as the protagonist), which acts to transform the specific place of the Danube Delta
into a mythical land. The film is overloaded with mythical and biblical motifs (Gelencs
er
2008, 26), which create a confusing and contradictory web of references. Mihail, the pro-
tagonist, bears the traits both of the prodigal son and Christ. Carpentry, nails, the silver
cup (the Holy Chalice), and the miracle of the seven loaves and fish are associated with
both Christ and the bearded Mihail (played by the musician F
elix Lajk
o). Mihail returns
home in order to build a stilt house on the river, which can be interpreted as a founda-
tional act, a new beginning for him and his community.
The mythical narrative represents the human body and sexuality symbolically: the
female body is the site of suffering where the community exercises its patriarchal power,
while incestuous sexuality can be interpreted as an opposition to the phallocentric order.
Mihail and his younger sister emigrate from the community and start a new life in the
realm of nature; they identify themselves as being different from the community. Initially,
their relationship does not transgress the territory of mutual respect and fraternal affec-
tion. Although Fauna makes approaches to Mihail, her brother does not respond to these.
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L. STO

The reserved Mihail escapes from past trauma and present temptation into drunkenness
and house-building, which primarily serves his own redemption.
Paradoxically, the stepfather, the representative of patriarchal society, creates the psy-
chic circumstances for the incest by forbidding Fauna to visit her brother. His aggressive
behaviour alienates the girl from the corrupt parental house: the more violently he tries to
exert power over Fauna, the more resolutely she seeks Mihail’s gentle and reassuring com-
pany. Mihail might be a comfort to her because he positions himself outside of the patriar-
chal world that she is used to, avoiding conflicts and quarrels and not objectifying her.
The stepfather feels provoked by Mihail’s indifference to his masculine values and Fauna’s
emotional attachment to her brother, and thus sparks the conflict between the patriarchal
universe and the siblings’ world, which culminates in rape. He violates Fauna in the
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moment when she silently expresses her wish to move to her brother’s place. By taking
Fauna’s virginity by force, the stepfather intends to restore patriarchal power over her,
which is threatened by the love between sister and brother. Power relations are inscribed
onto the female body through abuse, which is the logical conclusion of the devaluation of
women within the patriarchal symbolic order. ‘Rape is […] in rape-prone and patriarchal
contexts not an abnormal or anomalous occurrence it is rather an extreme expression
of a logic already pervasively at work in the society’ (Du Toit 2009, 66). Fauna’s rape is
shown in long shot, which renders the vicious event in a very abstract way, in contrast
with the strong physicality of the violation in Pleasant Days. The juxtaposition of these
two scenes reveals the shifted emphasis in Mundrucz
o’s representation of the body: in the
previous films the body is embedded in existing physical, social and psychical circumstan-
ces, whereas in the second phase of his career, it has been simplified into a highly coded
semiotic and symbolic function. Mundrucz
o initially distances the viewer from the girl’s
experience in order to represent rape as an inevitable act within the mechanism of patriar-
chy, cutting disjunctively between long-distance and extreme close-up shots, the latter
depicting the semen and blood on the girl’s thigh. In the aftermath of the rape, the actress
(Orsolya T
oth) expresses the mental experience of the trauma vividly. Fauna makes a vain
attempt to get rid of the semen and to get dressed but her uncertain movements indicate
that her badly hurt mind is temporarily outside of her badly hurt body.
Fauna comes to be Mihail’s partner, in his spiritual mission, through participation in
the sanctity of suffering. The girl’s body responds to her trauma by developing a high
fever, and Mihail cures his sister gently and with much devotion. The brother wraps his
sister’s body in a cold wet sheet in order to reduce the fever. In the healing sequence,
Fauna lies like the dead Christ in Mantegna’s painting, Dead Christ (1490): her arms and
hands lie alongside her body, her head is bent and her eyes are closed. The folds of the
sheet, the perspective and point-of-view of the camera emphasize the similarity. In refer-
ring to the iconography of Christ’s suffering and death, Mundrucz
o lends sanctity to the
sufferers and universalizes a particular experience (Figure 2).
The allusion to Christ’s dead body has another function in the film: as Christ was res-
urrected, so Fauna will also be reborn after the traumatic event and abandon her previous
life, as though she experienced the rape ‘as a kind of death or total loss of [her] self and
world’ (Du Toit 2009, 80). Mundrucz
o renders the post-traumatic symptoms of rape sym-
bolically. When Mihail checks whether his sister is alive she unconsciously holds her
brother’s hand as if she were a baby with grasp reflex, and later he feeds her as if she were
a child. Mihail’s gentle parental care constitutes the basis of trust and love between the
 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 149
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Figure 2. Delta: Fauna’s suffering.

siblings, and they consummate their union after Fauna’s rebirth. Mundrucz
o avoids the
representation of incestuous sexuality, using visual metonyms and metaphors to indicate
a sexual act between the siblings. When Mihail is looking at his sister lovingly for the first
time, while she is peacefully eating fried fish at the half-finished house, the camera moves
from a focus on the girl’s chest to her face (one can contrast this to the penetrative way of
looking at Maya in Pleasant Days). Fauna reciprocates the first sign of Mihail’s love with a
kiss but the camera position hides the siblings’ faces from the viewer. Mundrucz
o cuts to
a shot of rippling water in the night as a visual metaphor of passion and sexuality. The
camera moves then to the siblings sleeping naked in the wooden house, closing the
sequence with a peaceful composition. Nature lends its sublimity to the sexual encounter,
which is represented as a mythical, quasi-sacred event and not a physically lived act.
Mihail and Fauna’s carnal love is a positive form of sexuality that the film contrasts
with the phallocentric sexuality dominant in the patriarchal community (and represented
in the sexual abuses of the stepfather and other men). The siblings’ association based on
tenderness and reciprocity is, to some extent, the social basis of their utopian community,
materialized in the stilt house built on the water in the wilderness. The patriarchal barbar-
ity of the local community is juxtaposed with this act of incest, which symbolizes the
beginning of regained purity and the intentional violation of the laws of the symbolic
Father. When the siblings leave the community and start their new lives in the wilderness
by building a house on the water, they link themselves to nature. The girl has the symbolic
name of Fauna, the Roman Goddess of Fruitfulness, and the mythical association of the
female body with nature further enhances this traditional gender representation. The loca-
tion, the Danube Delta, symbolizes the realm of nature and a promise of spiritual rebirth,
and as such, is identified with the nurturing female body. M
onika D
an
el asserts that incest
transgresses the opposition between culture and nature. ‘It seems as if in this return it
would be possible to turn back into a state prior to culture and to restart the creation
story, to transcribe the incest prohibition’ (D
an
el 2012, 115). D
an
el’s statement is an apt
description of the building of the house and the renewal of their lives; in my view,
 150

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L. STO

however, the siblings are not returning to nature ‘before culture’, but rather founding their
utopia on the cultural ‘achievements’ of Christian love, forgiveness and tolerance.
The Danube Delta also plays the role of Europe’s Eastern border in the film, which is
approached by a mythical voyage in the opening scene. Mundrucz
o’s Delta is to some
extent a cultural stereotype: an isolated, far-away land of the Balkans. However,
Mundrucz
o also uses the vision of the Balkans as an element in the mythological storytell-
ing and the creation of a universal meaning. The community consists of ‘primitive’ people,
drunkards and aggressive males who cannot tolerate ‘otherness’ in their territory; this
intolerance leads them to murder Mihail, rape Fauna and set fire to the stilt house at the
film’s conclusion. The siblings transgress the sexual norms of the local community, who
regard the incestuous relationship as a threat to their ‘tribal’ laws and punish them.
o utilizes old clich
es concerning the ‘primitive passions’, ‘ethnic intolerance’
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Mundrucz

and Otherness of the Balkan people in order to create an antagonism between the two
communities: on the one hand, that of the sexuality and love of the incestuous siblings,
and on the other hand, that of the village where fierce machismo, marked male values and
patriarchal law reign. Rape and incest, as the two central acts involving the body in the
film, also stand in opposition to each other: the former represents the inherent logic of
patriarchal society, while the latter represents the authentic life of the siblings outside the
corrupt civilization. The antagonism between the groups of characters and between
the different sexual acts extends the opposition between the female concept of nature and
the male concept of Balkan society. ‘Unlike the standard orientalist discourse, which
resorts to metaphors of its object of study as female, the balkanist discourse is singularly
male’, asserts Todorova (2009, 15). Feminized nature and masculinized society struggle
with each other on the mythical and sociocultural level of the film.
The body comes into play as a symbolic object of mythically interpreted acts such as
rape, incest and redemptive suffering. Consequently, Delta offers overgeneralized and cul-
turally heavily burdened representations of the body. The director depicts male and female
bodies and behaviour according to traditional gender stereotypes. The female body repre-
sents the battlefield of the barbaric forces of the community, the symbolic site of general
defencelessness and the sacred place of suffering at the same time. Mundrucz
o exploits both
ancient myths of femininity and modern Western myths of the Balkan people in order to
create an ostensibly universal (in practice, internationally marketable) meaning for his film.
Mundrucz
o’s oeuvre exemplifies that even a director who is highly interested in bodily
presence, in part owing to his theatrical background, and who recurrently thematizes
humiliation and (sexual) exploitation in film and theatre,1 can be unaware of his own het-
eronormative attitude to gender and conservative body politics inherent in mythical
representation. Mundrucz
o simplified his bodily images by mobilizing mythical and patri-
archal narratives under the influence of the representatives of the universalist tradition in
Hungarian cinema (B
ır
o, Tarr). The festival circuit recognized and awarded his universal-
ized vision of life in Eastern Europe; nevertheless, he must face the danger of sacrificing
the particular experiences of specific human lives and their contradictions.

Acknowledgements
The author is very grateful to Ewa Mazierska, Matilda Mroz, and the anonymous reader of this arti-
cle for their comments and suggestions.
 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 151

Note
1. Mundrucz
o wrote and directed some important theatre performances, which analysed the
complex relationship between exploiters and the exploited (Neh

ez Istennek lenni/Hard To Be a
God, 2011, Sz

egyen/Shame, 2012)

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
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L


hr is an associate professor at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. He

or
ant Sto
has previously published a book on melodrama in Hungarian and essays on contemporary Hungar-
ian documentary (‘Inside Job. First Person Documentary in Trauma Cinema: Balkan Champion’,
Images. The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communica-
tion. Vol. 15. No 24. (2014) pp. 5 18.) and cinema (‘New Forms of Narrativity and Documentary
on DVD. Gy€

orgy P
alfi’s I’m not Your Friend-Project’, in Agnes

(Ed.) Film in the Post-Media
Petho
Age. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. pp. 357 380). His current research project
examines contemporary Hungarian cinema and documentary.

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