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| Me at the end of a workday too. |
In your heart of hearts, you still like Clerks. and Fight Club, but you're afraid r/criterion tryhards will bully you for "entry level" "film bro" taste. Sack up! But, in the meantime, you'll be pleased to know there's a better version of both: 2004's Hungarian sleeper kino Kontroll, set entirely in the underworld of a sprawling Budapest metro system so bleakly rendered that the film had to be prefaced by a piece-to-camera telling you it's not nearly so bad in real IRL.
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| The briefing room alone is impressively depressing (dimpressing). |
Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is our existentially weary protagonist working the thankless job of ticket inspector and sleeping overnight on the station platforms, resigned to a purgatorial existence of his own choosing. Commuters routinely try to swerve their fares and get belligerent when haplessly entreated to comply. The inspectors are threatened with knives, sprayed in the face with foam and violently beaten by football hooligans. They drink on shift, play games of chicken with the trains, and there are suspiciously high rates of suicide among the passengers.
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| Yeah...I could tell you some stories... |
But while this sounds about as fun as a chronic illness, Kontroll is at least half a comedy. Much of this sturm und/or drang is as perversely funny as After Hours, and what isn't is impactful in surprising other ways. There's compassion and cameraderie among the bickering inspectors, between Bulcsú and the kindly old train driver Béla (Lajos Kovács), and there's even a place for beauty and inspiration amid the grungy tunnels, in the form of archetypal dream waifu Zsófi (Eszter Balla):
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| And her bear behind. |
Yet these contrasts only serve to heighten the powerfully oppressive atmospherics of the subterranean scenario. At its bleary, acrid core, Kontroll is suffused with the same dense fog of dualism and Jungian nightmare imagery as the darkest of Lynch and Bergman.
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