by Douglas Messerli
Máté Konkol (screenwriter and director) Budapest, zárt város (Budapest, Closed City) / 2021 [13 minutes]
Péter is touring around his British friend
Adam (Adam Wadsworth) explaining how even old neighborhoods such as the one in
which he was born, have been torn down. Clubs have disappeared.
But even here Péter points to a woman
standing in the corner who has been following him, even though he’s cut her
from his intercut connections. Her intentions seem to be sexual, but it is almost
as if she might be a kind of spy trailing his whereabouts and behavior.
As the two boys finally leave the underground
club, and sit together in what seems to be a subway passage or an underground
walkway. Adam suggests that Péter should leave the city, to which Péter agrees,
but it’s clear he won’t, his days spent in hard work, his nights in partying. Adam
leans forward to kiss him, at first seeming to be accepted; but when Adam gets
more serious Péter backs off,
insisting “I can’t.”
Adam gets up and walks off. Péter can only
curse the impossibly frustrating situation. Soon after, the older woman from
the bar comes up behind him, carrying a bottle of wine. Péter gets up and walks
home with her for sex, clearly the only way to relieve his sexual duress. The
next morning, he gets up early to leave for work. The film does not even bother
to show us the two in bed, the sex, if it occurred, having been utterly
meaningless. Péter is a gay boy who in Budapest apparently cannot even live a
closeted life.
It’s not only the city’s nightlife that
the Orbán has basically closed down, but its citizens.
Los Angeles,
January 11, 2025
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).
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