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Moving Pictures

It's a play with the filmic language.
— György Pálfi, commentary track, Hukkle

Today's audiences often forget that movies started in silence. In the 80 years since the medium went audible, it's rare that a filmmaker works only in images. Hungarian director György Pálfi's first feature, Hukkle lacks on-screen dialogue. Still, as he notes on the DVD's commentary track, it's not really a silent movie. Characters do speak, out of sight, and we hear sounds, the rhythms of everyday life. According to Pálfi, though, the film focuses on scenes that occur after characters have finished their discussions.

Hukkle (the title is an onomatopoeitic play on one character's constant hiccups) has become one of the few Hungarian movies ever to get major international distribution. One viewing of this startling debut shows why. Sparkling and thought-provoking, Hukkle is the cinematic equivalent of a puzzle box wrapped up in ethnic enigmas and rural riddles. These elements complicate a simple story of death and deception. Its style -- part documentary, part thriller -- experiments with the lexicon of film, exploring new ways of telling a story.

The plot, which must be pieced together from snippets, tracking shots, and close-ups, appears to center on a little old lady's proficiency with poison. Selling the tiny bottles of destruction to the denizens of a small Slavic village, she's a one-woman Murder, Incorporated. Her clients spike their spouses' food, and suddenly, the population of the local cemetery is going up... up... UP!!!

This may sound darkly comic, yet Hukkle is so much more. It's a naturalist film noir, an adult version of a Grimm's fairy tale. The hiccupping old man is definitely a lark, acting as kind of a goofy Greek chorus to all the sinister goings-on around him, but images of corpses resting underwater, or local truck drivers spying shepherd girls with lewd intent tend to muddle things. For every out and out funny moment (a pissing police officer, an extreme close-up on the oversized balls of a hog), there is a counter-concept, whether provocative (half-glanced lover's trysts) or painful (a kitten in toxin-induced death throes).

By juxtaposing the pleasant with the profane, the film argues for life's intertwining circularity. In Hukkle, every individual and event is interlocked with each other. The local policeman investigating the deaths is the son of the village beekeeper. Dad's insects pollinate the surrounding farms. These fields contain both the wheat that every family uses for meals and baking, as well as the various herbs our villain uses to brew her venom. In essence, the crime is his father's fault. And by solving the case, the policeman condemns his own flesh and blood.

Other connections are more metaphorical. Families eat meals at dinner tables loaded with mouth-watering banquets. Of course, it is the same sustenance that will eventually kill the head of the household. Hukkle hints that all food is foul -- from the suffering of source animals to the poisoning of portions -- and the camera celebrates the visual succulence of a stew or the nastiness of a serving of liquefied chicken, clarifying the correlation between satisfaction and hazard. Or again, a hardworking woman comes home from the fields to make sure the lazy men of the household have their meal microwaved. By robbing them of her home cooking, she is denying them her love, as well as taking stand against chauvinism.

Repeatedly, the film mixes traditional and contemporary ideologies and technologies, women being the most adept at toggling between. As Pálfi suggests in the use of a telling folksong during Hukkle's finale, the women's murders of their spouses are a form of revenge: for adultery, for the reality of rural Hungary, a place oppressed by medieval notions of gender and social status. Scenes of the men drinking, gambling, and carousing, contrast with those of women slaving away in the sewing sweatshops or at home. As the filmmaker says in the DVD's "Behind the Scenes" featurette, he wants to "find the idyllic, only to then expose the evil underneath."

The "idyllic" appears first as a documentary, with landscapes and shots of people going about their rustic existence. Certainly, most of the material is fictional, crafted with cunning visual composition and inventive ideas (the sudden appearance of a low flying fighter jet over the town's canal, the use of song as the only "dialogue"). Pálfi also pushes certain cutesy concepts to the brink of breaking (the hiccupping old man grows aggravating very quickly). But he always manages to avoid disaster. Indeed, Hukkle is one of the most controlled and intricate films ever made.

Pálfi provides the basics -- actors, action, settings -- and it is up to us to put it all together, to make Hukkle hilarious or harrowing. Like its title, which has no literal meaning, you can read whatever you want into Hukkle. No answer is wrong, no interpretation the right one. Just like life. Just like death.