The last Hungarian movie I saw was The Countess, Julie Delpy's version of Erzebet Bathory's vampire existence, a properly gruesome meditation on the body and the lengths some Hungarians go to, not to die. Now there is White God , which won Un Certain Regard (A Certain Look) at Cannes last year and was selected as Hungary's hope for a foreign Oscar. Having no idea what other films Hungary released in 2014, I hesitate to pass summary judgment on writer/director Kornel Mundruczo's earnest endeavor. Decide for yourself at Opera Plaza Cinemas, starting Friday, April 3.
Spoiler alert: The first third of the two-hour narrative follows an adolescent girl misunderstood by her gruff father, who used to be a professor but now slices into hearts to certify sides of beef are fit for human consumption. Comparative anatomy, maybe. A drop of cow's blood lands on his chest like a mark of Cain, accusing him of conspiracy against peaceable quadrupeds. This isn't a movie about slaughterhouses or the meatpacking industry per se, but about man's inhumanity to animals, at least abstractly.
Dad wasn't informed, when he fetched his daughter from his ex-wife, that he was also being saddled (pun intended) with a dog. At first we think Dad's a garden-variety meanie, but no, there's something weird about dog licenses in this town by the Danube. When he enters his apartment building with young Lily, a nosey neighbor or concierge immediately snaps about the dog. It seems that mutts who aren't purebred Austrian breeds must be registered. There's a list. Well, that sounds like the Jew-herding techniques of the Third Reich, so we're in allegory territory.
There's some typical teenage angst for Lily, played with unmannered conviction by Zsofia Psotta, whose small, sturdy frame recalls the great Eastern bloc gymnasts. A star trumpeter in her school orchestra, Lily brings her dog to school to keep Dad from sending tawny mutt Hagen to a shelter. She's thrown out of rehearsal, and Dad dumps the dog in a vacant lot. Now begins a coming-of-age epic along the lines of Oliver Twist . Hagen starves, finds companionship with a Jack Russell terrier, is adopted by a handsome old hollow-cheeked bum, sold to a cafe owner, resold to a dog trainer. In a brief montage recalling Rocky, the mutt trains and trains for the big fight.
Matched with a German shepherd in a bout unconvincingly gentle by Hollywood standards, Hagen wins, then seems sorry he did. The bad guys want to buy him but the trainer won't sell, so they get tough and Hagen splits, but is rounded up and sent to the pound, where he's slated for destruction. Interspersed with Hagen's fabulous adventures is a subplot of generic teen troublemaking involving disco and drugs, which unexpectedly and unconvincingly transforms bad Dad into understanding parent. We don't hear any more about the concept of dogs-as-Jews, gypsies, or gays. It's hard, writing a script, to keep track of all the genres you're juggling.
After 90 minutes of this, White God flips into Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, with Hagen as that chimp who was really played by an actor whose performance was translated by computer using a technique called motion capture. The dog playing Hagen gives an outstanding performance, showing an enviable range, from good-natured tongue-lolling to snarly, growling display of canines. Even at his worst, you feel he's just acting, he doesn't mean it, he would never really bite you.
But Hagen is no pussy. He and his bitches track down every person who did him wrong and kill them, with a lot less collateral damage than you might expect. No scattered limbs, no severed heads. No humans or animals were harmed in the making of this picture. But instead of heading for the forest, as the apes do, Hagen and his pack �" well, you have to see what they do for yourself. It's very parable. A happy ending, perhaps, if you call happy having "a well-organized army" of stray dogs with a track record for targeted assassination under the sway of a pubescent trumpeter.
Opens April 3, Opera Plaza Cinemas in SF, and Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley.