Saturday, January 11, 2025

Máté Konkol | Budapest, zárt város (Budapest, Closed City) / 2021

controlling desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Máté Konkol (screenwriter and director) Budapest, zárt város (Budapest, Closed City) / 2021 [13 minutes]

 

Hungarian director Máté Konkol’s 2021 film Budapest, Closed City is a very sad testament to a once great and vital European capital city that, at least from the viewpoint of our young teen tourguide Péter (Péter Dániel Katona) is quickly closing down, all of its major cafes and bars having been closed by the government of Viktor Orbán, whose racist, homophobic, and generally rightist policies have turned Hungary into a country that the European Union no longer perceives as a democracy.



   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.

     Eventually the native Budapest boy takes his friend into what looks like a highly graffitied toilet, so terrible that even Adam comments that this must be the filthiest bathroom in all of Budapest. Yet actually it poses as the entrance to a semi-hidden club where singers perform and many of Péter’s friends can be found. You can perceive that he is more than a little proud to be able to introduce Adam around, all of them presuming that he might be his boyfriend, but no one willing to speculate. This is not a world in which homosexuality is accepted, and being openly gay or even engaging in homosexual behavior can end in violence or imprisonment.


     The two boys drink, and Adam, who doesn’t smoke pot, even asks for Péter to roll him a joint. It’s clear that Adam is enchanted and basically in love with his guide, now nearly desperate to engage in sex.

    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).

No comments:

Post a Comment

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...