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This strange, grotesque and visceral film could only have emerged from post-communist Eastern Europe, where fat, food and fantasy are common to both realism and surrealism. The film is the story of a freakish family told across three generations of men. The first is a hair-lipped orderly whose grim WW2 world consists of masturbation, peeping, and imbibing and expelling fire. His obese son is possibly part pig and emerges as a Hungarian champion of ‘sport eating’, becoming so fat he makes Monty Python’s Mr Creosote look like Posh Spice. His son is a skinny taxidermist forced to feed his father and his oversized cats, so pained by his progenitor’s disappointment that he reinvents himself, violently, into a work of modern art. The film is very gory and obscene but beautifully made; the faded colours of communist Hungary are artful yet tragic. This is the second film by Pálfi György (based on the brilliant short stories of poet and writer Parti Nagy Lajos) and represents the gluttonous world of a Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory gone seriously bad.

 

Mark Goodall on 12th July 2007
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