Europe Endless - Eastern Europe: Kontroll (Dir Nimród Antal, 1h45m, 2003)

 
Films set on the Metros, Undergrounds and Subways of the world are nothing particularly new. We can travel via The Taking of Peckham One Two Three, and its remake, 1926's Subway Sadie, The Warriors, Death Line, Metroland, Luc Besson's ultraslick breakthrough Subway (1985), and 2025's liminal horror game adaption, Exit 8. These spaces lend themselves well to romance, to horror, to crime, and this crosses language barriers and nationality. Eastern Europe is no exception, and thus; we travel to Hungary, or rather beneath its capital, Budapest. Here we encounter Nimród Antal, later to direct the so-so Predators (2010) and the gloriously stupid Through the Never in which Metallica engage in The Song Remains the Same-esque hijinks, and his directorial debut, the low-budget Kontroll (2003), depicting the bizarre subterranean life of a rag-tag group of ticket collectors.

Hungarian Cinema is something of a Cliff Notes of European cinema as a whole: birthed by the showing of films by the Lumieres in Budapest, and quickly growing into a home-grown fascination with the medium, it also had to overcome a number of setbacks, from the aftermath of the First World War, which would see one of its greatest talents, Alexander Korda leave for England, among others, the increasing lockstep with Nazi Germany, and Soviet censorship, from which a movement heavily influenced by the French New Wave as much as Soviet realism emerges. Into the post Soviet era of the 1990s arrive directors like Bela Tarr, Kornél Mundruczó and László Nemes, who peer into the bleakness of life in small town and rural Hungary in slow-moving, stunningly shot work. Against this, Kontroll feels like a rude awakening.

Taking place entirely in the Budapest Metro - the film itself begins with a disclaimer from what purports to be an employee of the company, drawing careful  distinction between the film's events and the real life location. The film certainly wastes no time in introducing its aesthetic, a grungy, electro-techno soundtracked dystopian view of modern Hungary, a microcosm of which is seemingly trapped below as a a veritable militia of ticket inspectors. Antal would regard everyone from Tarkovsky to Terry Gillam to Takeshi Kitano as an influence, and if the film has a flaw, it's that it wears these influences openly; the entrapment of its workforce and the under-lit stations call to mind the battered space station of Solaris, or Gillam's Brazil, whilst the conditions the ticket inspectors, the "Kontroll" of the title are subjected to violence that is at once bruising and absurd.

One of these inspectors is Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi), who goes as far as to sleep on the platforms of the Metro, and whose crew range from the tough, shaven-headed Professor (Zoltán Mucsi), the narcoleptic Muki (Csaba Pindroch), to the child-like Tibi (Zsolt Nagy); their team is even by the Metro's standards, oddballs, against which the script by Antal and Jim Adler places the figure of Gonzó (Balázs Mihályfi), with whom Bulcsú has a rivalry that -almost- turns deadly as they engage in dangerous adrenaline rushes that require them to run along the tracks before the last train, or die trying. There is a grim humour underpinning much of Kontroll; our protagonist is assaulted at least half a dozen times, with him eventually ending up bloodied from multiple injuries, but there is a grim amusement in the daily combat with the passengers that almost all the inspectors seem to relish. 

Yet, there is also a Kafka-esque sense of entrapment - the inspectors are trapped in this cycle of violence, with seemingly no escape. Bulcsú, it is hinted, has left a previous job on the surface world, only to find himself in another form of servitude. This outlandish world is inhabited by the macabre and the absurd; the film introduces a number of figures who populate this subterranean world, from the troublesome, a headphones wearing fare-dodger, Bootsy, who leads the group in a chase, and the elderly train driver (Lajos Kovács) to the nefarious and shadowy figure, hooded, who appears at several points to attack and push people onto the tracks, and whose form haunts Bulcsú's dreams. Yet, there is light even in this gloomy underworld, in the form of Zsófi (Eszter Balla), whose sudden appearance is a breath of fresh air, the arrival of some form of hope, of an escape from this labyrinth, which the film steadily develops over the next hour. 

With her, Bulcsú's world becomes a little lighter, even as the oppressive nature of this nightmarish iteration of the metro presses in, even as Bulcsú is haunted by the subterranean world, he seems unable to escape. Kontroll is a remarkable debut, and the equal of any Western European action tale in its slick, stylish, and yet oppressive vision of Budapest's Metro and the figures that drift through it

Rating: Highly Recommended

Kontroll is available on DVD from Drakes Avenue Pictures: it is not available on Streaming in the UK. 

Next week we round out our adventures in Eastern Europe with Cristi Puiu's icy crime drama, Aurora