Blue Fog Is Blue Fog

BOREDOM is itself boring, except in Chekhov's plays," writes literary critic George Watson. Ugliness is itself ugly, one might add, and this fact strikes home in Time Stands Still, a new Hungarian film directed by Peter Gothar. Set mostly in a high school in Hungary after the 1956 rebellion, Time Stands Still is mercilessly unvarying. Gloomy blue lighting, harsh, barking voices, and interminable sordid scenes--such as the pornographic picture postcards the director insists on showing--merge in a powerful social description of the dreariness of life under a repressive Communist government. The very factors that give the movie its power as a piece of social commentary, though, conspire to make it a depressing aesthetic experience.

The cold ugliness of the environment is set off against the powerful, raw life-forces of the high school kids, who find their outlet in American rock and roll songs. Gothar tries, however, to make this brutal contrast bolster up wooden acting, unimaginative cinematography, incomprehensible scenes and insignificant symbols, not too mention cliched, anemic dialogue.

The film opens with scenes of the rebellion of 1956 that are shot in black and white with incongruous swing music playing in the background. In a smoking crater, the father of Dini Koves (Istan Znamenak), the movie's hero, is burying something. The white lightning through the smoke is actually quite impressive. During the following scene, Papa tears himself away from his family to flee back to the United States. All the participants in this emotionally charged situation, however, seem emotionally uninvolved. Papa moves as if someone offstage is yelling directions at him: Over here, no, over there! Now hit the kid. Now kiss the wife.

The remainder of the film, excepting the epilogue, takes place some years later while Dini is in high school, and is shot through some kind of blue fog filter. This technique sometimes gives the sensation of dreaminess, and sometimes gives the sensation of a blue fog filter.

Dini has inherited a certain lack of expressiveness from his father: in the first big scene between him and the girl, Magda(Aniko Ivan), the two snap mechanically at each other. The listless interchange culminates when Dini hold Magda's arm, saying, "I won't let you go." Magda yanks free with a curt "piss off" and walks away.

Several of the scenes seem to exist only to reinforce a brutal, Lord-of-the-Files sense of the school. In one, a group of kids in a classroom groan an incomprehensible ditty about teeny-weeny-twirly-spirals. Yet, the movie gets the benefit of the doubt in this case, since the translation is probably to blame for taking away the meaning of the scene. Some of the lines and gestures, though, can only be schmaltz in any language. At one point, Dini is at a bar with an old con; after explaining his feelings, the con mutters. "And as for women ... ", and the two clink their glasses together.

ON THE WHOLE, the movie suffers from overnarration--too much tell, not enough show. Time really does stand still when the old con begins to tell the Koves boys about his "purification" in prison. A dramatic moment hovers in the wings, but the talk degenerates into a discussion of the con's agricultural opinions and the potential disappears. Such subtlety may tell us more about the "purification" than a blown-up scene, but man cannot live on realism and understatement alone. "Boredon is itself boring .... "

Not that there are no exciting scenes at all. Picrre (Sandor Soth), a sort of Jimmy Dean rebel, seizes the microphone during a Party leader's speech at the school and shouts "Long live the idiots!" Later, Pierre leads a race through the halls, ripping down photographs from the walls, "Jailhouse Rock" playing in the background. Just before running into the totalitarian Vice Headmaster, he throws himself through a closed window.

Though full of power, meaning and excitement, both these scenes are much too short. Of course, making Pierre's revolts anything but momentary outbursts would contravert the director's depiction of an overpowering dreariness. But by American standards, the two moments of action are the film's only points of real interest.

Like an American Grafitti behind the Iron Curtain, the movie examines its several characters in an Epilogue. This one, though, provides no ironic afterword on the plot. The sexual denouement between Dini and Magda is completely incomprehensible, while the Koves family sings an old national folk song in a vaguely optimistic scene so inconsonant with the rest of the movie that it may have been government-mandated.

Time Stands Still is summed up in one scene in which the Vice Headmaster turns Dini's classroom upside down looking for dirty postcards as the boys stands at attention. The scene drags on and on until the audience gets the same awful, sinking feeling as the boys on the screen. As a piece of anti-communist propaganda such a moment is effective; as a piece of art, it is simply unpleasant.