Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu May 11, 2006 11:06 am 
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Getting spacey

Though unknown in the US, Hungarian director József Pacskovszky, whose new movie See You in Space (Ég veled!) was shown in the latter part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, 2006 version, has several previous features to his credit and an ample state-supported production behind this multi-romance movie (and multi-national production) with sci-fi and whimsical overtones. Moscow, Rome, Budapest and a space station orbiting the earth; Russian, Italian, Hungarian dialogue. Multinational cast, references to terrorism? Globalization, perhaps? You would think the forty-five-year-old Hungarian director is throwing too much into the multi-plotted soup, but he has a handsome visual style, nice music, and a pretty light touch to help compensate. This is no dark, brooding goulash. The only trouble is there doesn't seem to be much thought or wisdom invested in the stories, though the individual scenes are bright and colorful and well acted. If this is Kieslowski, as it seems at some moments, it's Kieslowski lite with a Fifties Tuscan accent. Here's what we're dealing with:

A Cosmonaut way out in space whose wife leaves him for an Italian illusionist, a handsome, charming philanderer (they speak Italian-- and there's some Italian production money in the film too, I think). The Cosmonaut and his handlers speak Russian, of course.

A wide-eyed male Budapest scientist who woos an African woman co-worker, a runner. Recovering from her sadness when she discovers by answering his cell phone that her boyfriend is married, the African lady tells her girlfriend a "funny" story about how she was sexually "touched" as a seven-year-old in Africa by a white man. They punished him. How? "We ate him." Perhaps strangely, this gets a laugh, and it's one of the movies' most memorable moments.

A dear, chubby old man with a lovely huge apartment and a nest egg who's befriended by a pretty young hairdresser after she accidentally cuts his ear. He might leave his money to her, but that event is short-circuited by events. This relationship is slight and sweet; the others are a bit more extended -- except for one between a woman lawyer who's increasingly gone on her imprisoned client, a story not very easy to follow or see the point of, though the lawyer happens to sit on a park bench next to the Cosmonaut's wife at one point, thus casually linking two of the stories.

Andrei, the formerly perky Cosmonaut, becomes despondent and refuses to come back to earth. In the festival Q & A the director said in fact the Russians left a Cosmonaut in space because they didn't have the money to retrieve him. By this he may have been conflating two factoids, that of Sergei Avdeyev, who spent a record time in space, and of the abandonment of the Mir Space station, where Avdeyev had been stationed. Anyway Andrei's wife gets wise to the Italian illusionist's unfaithful ways and decides to jump off one of the tallest old buildings in Budapest.

But when she jumps, she floats out in space and goes to the spaceship where Andrei is and knocks on the window. It's not likely he can let her in. . .

The scientist with the almost childlike eagerness and big eyes is the most striking figure in the piece. The others leave only a generic impression: the pert, independent African woman; the oily but sexy Italian; the loveable, corpulent old man.

The fanciful ending departs from Kieslowski and drifts back to Zavattini and Fellini and the Fifties. If the lady had just fallen off the building and died on the pavement the movie would have had an ending at once more acid and more tidy, but Pacskovszky would rather dabble than delve.

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