Taxidermia

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): ****

Wikipedia reports that Taxidermia, a 2006 Hungarian film that was released in the United States belatedly and briefly last August, earned a total American box office of $11,408. Hardly surprising, given this is an incredibly challenging film to market. Even though it has abundant elements of gross-out body horror, it's really not something that would be promoted as a horror film. And though it is often shriekingly funny in the most disturbed and perverse ways, it might be a cruel joke indeed to lure audiences with the promise of comedy. Plus, it's a Magyar art film. Who goes out to see those in August, besides characters in Woody Allen movies?

And yet, Taxidermia is awfully easy to describe. If the Farrelly Brothers were Viennese Aktionists vine-ripened on a steady diet of subversive Eastern Bloc satire - early Forman, early Makavejev, and the like - and possessed of a highly formal visual style, then this is the movie they would make.

However, to describe it in thorough detail would be to rob the viewer of the delight (and/or disgust) in watching it. The jaw-dropping element of WTF!? surprise is part of what makes Taxidermia special. Director György Pálfi indulges in an intense, visceral theme, one about man consumed by base, dare one say animal, instincts, and a few of the seven deadly sins, especially lust and gluttony. As it tracks the progress of a genetic line through three generations of men, each symbolic of a specific phase of Hungarian history (World War II, the Cold War, and post-Soviet), the film only ups the ante, embracing the grotesque even as it frames the most excessive moments as a surrealist gag.

The movie's opening segment unspools as a folk tale from hell. Shot in a sepia haze, it gives us the lowly spectacle of a military orderly stationed in some god-awful village, a place so remote, so snowbound, and so devoid of ordinary pleasures - at least for the soldier - that he amuses him self by somehow rigging a flare to his vitals and turning his erect penis into a flamethrower. Various other masturbatory adventures follow, washed in dream sequence tones that imply much of the episode is one long fantasy. Sheep, village girls, the lieutenant's obese wife, a slaughtered pig … it's all fair game, in a vertiginous swirl that attempts to elevate the brutality of existence into poetic black comedy. The soldier may ejaculate into the starry cosmos, but he winds up siring an infant with a pig tail. It's not just great storytelling, it's a philosophy of the world.

If part one of Taxidermia is much concerned with blood, guts and precious bodily fluids, part two is mostly about binging and purging. The pig-tailed boy grows up to be Kálmán, a champion competitive eater whose soup guzzling and mutton chewing skills have made him the pride of the bloc. Stocky like an old-school weight lifter, he carries himself with pride. To paraphrase Norman Mailer on Maria Schnieder in Last Tango in Paris, Kálmán rides his gut like a chariot. Sharing his passion is his female counterpart, Gizi, who stands by loyally through the epic post-match vomit sessions and storm-clouds of flatulence. Their romance is a beautiful, tender, beefy thing, and though Kálmán is sidelined by an injury, they have a child together, Lajoska.

The film's final third, set in contemporary Hungary, follows a perversely logical arc to its final extreme. Now a young man, Lajoska runs a taxidermy studio, where he specializes in large animals and unusual projects. He's rejected gluttony. Weedy and drawn, he barely eats at all, purchasing the same few items everyday at a grocery store. His daily routine concludes with a visit to his father, now ballooned to an absurd weight that leaves him immobilized under a mountain of fat - like a distant cousin of Austin Power's Fat Bastard. He lives in a cell-like room stacked high with boxes of candy bars, which he eats while watching competitive eating broadcasts on an old TV. Father and son do not have a good relationship. But the slop bucket has to be emptied and the small army of cats, kept behind bars in a separate room, have to be fed or … things could go terribly wrong. And you think they won't?

Rest assured, just when you think you've seen it all, Taxidermia wants to show you one more thing. Or two. Bloody offal, it may be, but it's stuffed with enough brilliant visual ideas and sly commentary to earn its devilishly executed audaciousness.