A Pilgrim’s Digression

Netflix reviews of the film Kontroll invariably make it sound like an action-adventure film, “…featuring nail-biting races in pursuit of crooks” and characters “all of whom are desperately racing against time and their surroundings to find one another.” I didn’t quite view the film in any of these ways.

While not as plotless and deeply philosophical as many European films, Kontroll is an odd mixture of comedy and mystery. In typical European fashion, the mystery is solved in a vague, inconclusive way, so really what makes this movie worth watching are the odd-ball characters and the comedic touches.

Kontroll is set entirely within the Budapest, Hungary, metrotrail system. Ostensibly about a mysterious murderer who is pushing people in front of trains (his identity is never revealed), the plot actually revolves around a character named Bulcsú (pronounced Boolchoo) who is a Kontroll, a ticket checker for the transit system. Described as “a dashing young man” by Netflix, there is very little that I would describe as “dashing” about any of the men in this film. Hungarian men like to spit, apparently. No conversation is compete without the punctuation of a fine spray of spittle directed either angrily at the ground or at the face of one’s conversant.

Nor is the Budapest transit system particularly “dashing” either. Gloomy, dirty, rattling, graffiti-covered, the ancient trains carry equally grubby Eastern Europeans to wherever such people go during the day.

Instead of buying a ticket and paying at a turnstile, Budapest metro riders buy a ticket, board the train, and the Kontroll walk the cars requesting to see people’s passes. It is apparently a thankless job. Most of the comedic aspects of the film concern the half-hearted attempts of Bulcsú and his comrades in Kontroll to perusade people to show their tickets or passes. Passengers beat them, insult them, ignore them, and set dogs upon them (apparently dogs are allowed on the Budapest metro).

On the other hand, Kontroll officers can be petty tyrants as well. The more fascist among them are granted the privilege of wearing a black leather jacket with a red armband as a uniform, while slackers like Bulcsú only wear the red armband over their ordinary clothes. The ticket takers also assault recalcitrant passengers, and in one case a mentally disturbed officer cuts the throat of a passenger whom he says punched him first.

As it turns out, all of the Kontroll officers are disturbed in some way. Bulcsú nevers leaves the subway, simply stretching out on a deserted platform when he gets tired, and eating in one of the underground fast food places. We find out later that he once had a good job, probably as an architect or designer of some kind, but left the job because he was afraid that his ambition was driving him mad. The central conflict of the plot involves whether he will give up his lonely life underground and join the “living” again. His friends and fellow Kontroll officers are abnormal, as well: one is an aging former Professor, another is a narcoleptic, another a rather deranged little man with the face and disposition of a terrier, and yet another is an immature, perhaps mentally retarded, young man who has been on the job just two weeks.

The actors protraying these characters are really quite brilliant and, for me, provide the highlights of the film: Lecsó (Leh-cho), the terrier, tenaciously trying to persuade a fat queer to show him his ticket; Tibi (Tee-bee) puking on the professor’s shoes when he first sees a body that has been crushed by a train, and the professor telling him in his resigned way that it’s OK, he’ll just tell people a big bird shit on him; Muki, the narcoleptic, angrily denouncing a passenger for not having a ticket, only to suddenly fall asleep and fall to the ground.

The movie is worth seeing for scenes like these alone. At other times I found myself hitting fast-forward, especially during those long, typical European scenes in which nothing happens and no one says anything.

Adding inadvertantly to the humor of the film, it begins with a short prelude in which a Metro official, reading from a cue card he holds in his hand, says that though some might question his decision to allow filmmaker Nimrod Antal to film in the metro, he wished to help a young director make his first film. And anyway, anyone can see that the film is highly symbolic and not based on reality; employees of the Budapest metro don’t really act the way they are depicted in the film.

One hopes not, but even if the ticket takers don’t threaten you, insult your speech impediment, proposition you for sex in exchange for letting you ride for free, or slit your throat, the Metro system itself hardly seems like a desirable way of getting round the city, if one ever travels to Budapest.

As I watched, I kept thinking to myself that for all its faults, the Washington Metro certainly is not as dreadful as the Budapest Metro, and a WMATA official ought to arrange a workshop here in Washington for the Budapest transit authorities, so they can discover a better way of getting people from one place to another. To start with, it’s always best to require people to buy tickets and use them at a turnstile before ever descending to a train platform. That just seems like a matter of common sense. Unfortunately, common sense is often lost on bureaucracies, which are notoriously inefficient, even dehumanizing, in their quest to maintain control.

Maybe this dehumanization is finally what the film comes to “symbolize,” in the words of the sensitive bureaucrat director of the Budapest Metro.