Film Review: Taxidermia
Taxidermia (2006)
Directed by: Gyorgy Palfi
Written by: Lajos Parti Nagy (short stories), Gyorgy Palfi, Zsofia Ruttkay
Starring: Csaba Czene, Gergely Trocsanyi, Marc Bischoff, Gabor Mate
Review by: Britt Hayes
Imagine Jean-Pierre Jeunet if he were Hungarian and making a sick and twisted film about sexual depravity inspired by early Cronenberg. That’s Taxidermia. An anthology film directed by Gyorgy Palfi and based on two short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy (with a third story added by Palfi and co-writer Zsofia Ruttkay), Taxidermia follows three generations of men through World War II, Communist-era Hungary, and the present.
It begins with the story of Morosgavanyi (Czene), a low-ranking soldier at the mercy of his dictatorial superior on a farm in the winter. Morosgavanyi is a sexually depraved man with a lust for fire. He plays with candles, seductively inhaling the flame and moving the heat along his hare-lipped mouth before masturbating and mysteriously (if almost whimsically) shooting fire out of his penis. This isn’t the least of your concern. Morosgavanyi is starved for sexual pleasure, and fantasizes about his superior’s daughters and slovenly, heavy-set wife. One night, he makes love to his superior’s wife atop a pig carcass, and so Kalman (Gergely Trocsanyi) is born.
Fittingly, baby boy Kalman has a curly pig’s tail that gets chopped off by Morosgavanyi’s commanding officer, who has taken it upon himself to raise the young man. Kalman grows up to become a competitive speed-eater for now-Communist Hungary. He’s known for his speed-eating “cross-swallow” technique and impressive vomiting. Throughout the duration of the second chapter in this film, the viewer is treated to an onslaught of gastric expulsion with no relief in sight. Kalman tries to impress the women’s speed-eating champion, Bela, another heavy-set woman. In the hospital, after Kalman succumbs to lock-jaw during a competition, Bela visits him. As she leans over his bed, her hairy armpit drips sweat onto his lip. Unflinchingly, he licks it off. Bela and Kalman have a baby, and so Lajoska is born.
Lajoska is a near-skeletal looking young man who spends his time tending to his now morbidly obese father, Kalman (played in this part by Gabor Mate in one serious fat suit), who eats carts full of unwrapped chocolate bars, insisting that the foil is absorbed by his body and finds a function. This is a ridiculous idea, to be sure, but could it be a metaphor for the things we find to be excessive and meaningless in life? Surely these things we take issue with find their function. Kalman doesn’t get around much, and instead focuses his energies on fattening up a trio of “competition” cats with lard, as if they were his own personal speed-eating team. When Lajoska isn’t taking care of his father, he’s running a taxidermy shop and failing to impress the cute grocery store clerk (it couldn’t be that animal skin coin purse, could it?)
These three tales of depravity and hunger build up to a sad, but visually enthralling end, framed by disembowelment, despair, and yes, Taxidermia. Palfi has all the visual proficiency of a Jeunet or a Cronenberg, but taken to the most visceral Nth degree. With extended scenes of vomiting and all manner of bodily function and fluid, Taxidermia is not intended for those with weak constitutions. This isn’t some trumped-up claim to insinuate that you see it immediately. Unlike Peter Jackson’s comical and oft slapsticky use of blood and gore, Palfi focuses on fluids and bodies – inside and out – of humans and animals alike. These are graphic and saccharine-free looks at the most disgusting and deplorable parts of human life, devoid of winks and nods.
Some scenes, however, are wildly stunning from an artistic approach. A scene tracing the history of a wooden bathtub as Morosgavanyi smells the used bath water of his superior’s daughters has the camera revolving under and over floor boards, as with each flip we see the bath tub’s prior functions from a casket to a place where a woman once made bread. Even pig carcasses and ejaculate in the form of fire are visually compelling. If Palfi could wrangle his vision a little better, he could go on to make incredible cinema, his name held up among his forebears.
What lies under all the nauseating imagery? A story about men who hunger, men who have desires that seem boundless and impossible to satiate. These are also men concerned with life and fulfilling what they consider their destiny. For Morosgavanyi, he desires to procreate, not only satisfying an urgent hunger, but carrying on his manhood, which he is awfully pre-occupied with in ways beyond the realm of sanity. In a gorgeous scene, Morosgavanyi opens a large pop-up book with Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Little Match Girl. The correlation is obvious (matches, fire), and Morosgavanyi steps into the actual book, becoming a character in the story, where his intentions toward the little girl are less than pure. Of course, this is all alluded to with perverted insinuations before we are taken out of the book and back to Morosgavanyi’s depraved little life.
For Kalman, his legacy is speed-eating, and having become physically incapable of continuing his former life, he displaces his need onto his cats. His son, Lajoska, is a disappointment – a wiry, thin child, who stays painstakingly fit as an act of rebellion toward his father. There is a mutual objection and resentment between father and son.
Lajoska’s interest in taxidermy is the most interesting of the three. By stuffing these animals, he is seeing them live forever, and through his intimate acquaintance with their bodies, he may have found a sense of control in the matters of life and death. Unfortunately, I don’t feel that enough time is spent with Lajoska’s story, and the climax feels woefully rushed and ill-explained. On the one hand, the viewer can freely assume and infer their own story for Lajoska, but on the other, it feels like Palfi may have short-changed his third act. What happens in the end is spectacular, and while you may have never guessed it, it feels as if there was no other logical conclusion.
Taxidermia comes full circle as a rumination on fulfillment, hunger, and immortality, with all three being interchangeable depending on how you interpret things.
