Budapest Noir

“It’s Budapest, Ziggy.” 

No, that line is not spoken here but it could’ve been. The echo, of course, of Polanski’s Chinatown. Hungarian expat Eva Gardos brilliantly exercises the classic Hollywood film noir — but she sets it in 1936 Budapest. 

Normally the noir genre expresses America’s postwar resignation, despair, cynicism, the nightmares of the political upheavals shadowed further by the cellars explored by the new psychology. It valourizes the fatalist isolation of the truth-seeking hero who is alone afflicted with terminal ethics. Taint contagious.

By setting her revival of the genre in Hungary just before it submitted to the Nazis, Gardos reclaims the American genre as equally applicable to, perhaps even deriving from, the European culture. That did provide the genre’s base in Existentialism as well as the harrowing revelations of WW II. 

The film may gain another element from her eye on America in its current chaos, abandonment of its traditional character and its corruption. She may suggest that Europe may now have to become what America has ceased to be. As Angela Merkel observed, Europe can’t count on America anymore. So it has to slip itself into the philosophic, cultural and political structures America has vacated. So Gardos claims for Europe one of America’s most iconic genres.

Crime reporter Szigmund goes through the usual noir routine of working alone, bucking his boss’s orders and some police charges, getting beaten up a few times, spurning some women, enjoying others but losing the one that counts. Down those garish mean night streets the man must walk alone. 

The quest takes the hero across the social spectrum. He confronts the government as well as street thugs. He visits boxing matches, first in a posh nightclub where both men and women fight each other, then in a lower scale alley venue. He traces his corpse back to a high-class brothel, aptly called Les fleurs de mal, where the pros lure their beaux into their lair. 

By the way, Szigmund also cracks as wise as the hardest boiled US dick. He and his sharp blonde photographer love could match Nick and Nora. 

Szigmund is determined to do whatever good he can, however small. He offers a coin to the hungry little daughter of the thug who just beat him up (and turns out to have killed the woman). Our hero’s good deed only exposes the wider evil in that world: “I’m too young to do that,” the baby-toothed girl explains, rejecting the coin. The kid’s knowing and resignation are more chilling than her action would have been.

Szigmund has an in with current police chief because he helped expose the corruption of his predecessor. That collaboration — and the chief’s honesty — now pass their shelf-life expiry date.

By solving the mystery of a Jewish prostitute’s death he shines a brief light into the darkness about to break on the age. The plot pivots on the personal and global tragedy that grew out of Europe’s antisemitism. 

The exact time is significant. The historic Hungarian prime minister Gyula Gombas, a latent Fascist, has just died and is being given an all-consuming state funeral. The death of an apparent whore would normally slip by unnoticed — except this one briefly connected with our hero and he won’t let her death pass unmarked. 

The personal resolution opens into the international. The solution of the mystery is rooted in the antisemitism of the time. The girl left home because her father wouldn’t let her marry her true love, a rabbi’s son. That put her on the streets, then the brothel. 

But her father had his reasons. He knew the looming terror and the abiding danger, of being Jewish. Indeed his fortune and prospects for dealing with Nazi Germany hinge on this own conversion from the faith. 

The persecution of the Jews then — and some would add, arguably now — only led to the wider assault on other ethnicities, minorities, religions, and human rights in general. The assault goes beyond the Jewish woman and her father’s death. Szigmund’s photographer and lover Krisztina has just had to flee someone who objected to her photograph of the Jews assailed in Berlin: “His name was Adolph and he had a little moustache under his nose.” In resistance, she’s taking her work for an exhibition in London. 

In the last scene Szigmund’s smokes-seller tells him he’s closing his stand. He’s a one-armed veteran of the last war, struggling to survive, too honest for politics, but he’s a Jew. For that reason someone just threw a brick through his window. He has to leave.

Szigmund tries to reassure him. After all, the reporter may know his crime world, his own conscience, the country’s politics, perhaps even the noir conventions about to erupt in American cinemas. But he doesn’t know the storm about to sweep from Berlin across Europe.  
     So he tries to assure his frightened Jewish friend: “It’s Budapest.”
     That’s where I came in.