Taxidermia

György Pálfi

Siren Visual Australia

R4 DVD

Taxidermia is the second film from enigmatic Hungarian director György Pálfi. György Pálfi came to international prominence some few years ago when he released Hukkle to the film festival circuit. Hukkle, means ‘hiccup’ in Hungarian and was shot without dialogue and used the sounds effects of a village that occurred during a twenty four hour period to express the story.

Taxidermia is certainly more controversial and outrageous than his first film. It is the tale of three generations of a Hungarian family seen through the lens of the primary physical functions of each generation i.e. sex, food and the body itself. These, of course, interlock to create a strange fantasy like tale of the brutality and beauty of life.

The first generation is set during an unnamed period of war, in an unspecified isolated location somewhere in Europe. The central character is a soldier Vendel Morosgovanyi, who is obsessed with sex of all forms and especially enjoys the sado-masochistic pain of the flames of a candle. His fantasies are about all sorts of women including the commander’s wife, a younger girl in a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale and the commander’s daughters. He especially enjoys watching the commander’s daughters showering and urinating and is addicted to masturbation. Throughout this first section sexual fantasies are vividly explored and portrayed, ranging from the mildly strange to the bizarre, include a scene with a dick shooting flames, sticking his dick through a hole to masturbate and nearly having it bitten off by a chicken and a sexual fantasy where he is making love to a frustrated fat woman, only to finally realize he is humping a bath containing the remains of a slaughtered pig and for this final disgrace he is shot in the head !

The slaughtering of the pig is shockingly realistic and this links the sex of this final story to the food of the next. In addition, Vendel Morosgovanyi’s commander in this episode is Superior Officer Balatony and it is from him the next story unfolds, he fathers a child and when he finds it has a small tail, he brutally removes it with a pair of metal clippers.

In this section, as in all, the look, feel and sound of the film is superb. The creative filming ranges from a great scene where a single old bathtub is spun time and time again showing its constant use for everything from birth to death, cooking to cleaning. There is also an impressive, if not a little creepy, scene with a pop up book of the Little Matchbox girl coming to life as part of the Morosgovanyi’s sexual fantasies.

This first section gives you some idea of the explicitness of this film. Many have been shocked by the sheer physicality of much of the imagery; there are lots of organs, bodily fluids, sex, vomiting, dissection and ultimately death. It is interesting how separate we perceive ourselves to be from our bodily functions and how their depiction on screen can shock or offend. It is as though meat grows on trees and doesn’t come from dead animals, babies are born in the cabbage patch and nobody masturbates. This is a brutally honest film which confronts human experience in its bare and uncontrived form. It uses a mixture of fantasy and realism, taking things to an absurd extreme so that the simple truth of each generation of the family shown in this film can be experienced directly and without gloss or pretense.

The next section focuses on competitive speed eating. The scenes of competitive eating are deliberately confronting with lots of eating and vomiting interwoven with a tale of love, marriage and betrayal. At the same time there is a deliberate focus on the sheer bulk of the main characters, confronting us with their obesity and life focused on food and sex. The motif of the desire to consume both food and a partner is emphasized throughout this tale and the betrayal lays the foundation for the final story.

The final tale brings together many of the motifs of the film and is centred on the competitive eater of episode two and his son. He has become outrageously obese and lives isolated in a small unit with a specially designed chair so his waste can be cleared away when his son visits. He constantly practices speed eating even though he can no longer move from his chair. He eats confectionary with the papers on so he can swallow them faster as he believes he could still win a speed eating competition if only he could get out the door. He is the ultimate image of self deception and yet at the time evokes revulsion and sympathy at the same time. He is trying to breed super obese cats and keeps them locked behind security doors and feeds them on lard to fatten them up. The Son, who was born small and has grown up to be thin and sickly, runs a taxidermy practice where he stuffs everything from bears to putting fetuses into plastic baubles for rich doctors !

The son feeds his father and the cats every day and spends a fortune on food bills; he has no other life except taxidermy and his father who constantly abuses him for being skinny and sickly. When he looses his temper he forgets to lock the cat’s cage and returns to find the cats have eaten thrown his father’s stomach and are munching on his entrails. In penance for disappointing his father, he stuffs him (literally) and makes him a “work” of art and then finally operates on himself placing himself into an automatic taxidermy machine in an extremely graphic sequence.

This rather surreal and bizarre film then ends when the bodies are displayed in a museum with a commentary on them by the doctor who went there to have a fetus turned into a bauble.

This is quite an experience, it is as though John Waters went to Hungary and made a foreign language film. It is explicit, confronting, graphic and deliberately uses exaggeration to create a mythic fantasy landscape grounded in realism but way beyond anything most of us could imagine. At the same time this is not exploitation cinema, the images are used for a reason and there is a visual texture to the film which is meaningful and powerful. There are significance themes running through this film exploring the universal constants of human experience (sex, food and death) admittedly through a surreal and graphic film, yet one that is surprisingly visually beautiful and moving as well.

Extras include an interview with Australian critic David Stratton and Director György Pálfi and a trailer.