Katalin Varga: it’s the kind
of title that, beyond telling you its subject is a woman, gives nothing
away and encourages you to look more closely at the synopsis and
credits. You then discover it’s a Romanian-Hungarian-UK co-production,
with a first time English-speaking writer-director, Peter Strickland,
at the helm. You also discover that, at its core, it’s a rape-revenge
film.
If the film is more The Virgin Spring than Last House on the Left in
its art-house rather than exploitation trappings, it's nevertheless
still a daunting combination of filmmaker and material that’s far
easier to get wrong than right.
As an outsider, Strickland has one
obvious advantage: he can engage with subject matter the insider
cannot. But he also thereby suffers from an obvious disadvantage: can
he really understand this subject matter as an insider would? (And, if
so, perhaps we then might ask which insider’s perspective that we are
we talking about, that of the male perpetrator, the female victim or
some third party?)
Happily Strickland proves more than adequate
to the challenge he has imposed on himself, as he exposes male and
female attitudes that seem both universal and the product of specific
historical circumstances; draws nuanced and believable performances
from his cast; and reveals an eye for landscape and place that for me
recalled early Werner Herzog – perhaps not a surprising connection when
we consider Katalin Varga’s Transylvanian setting and the at times
Popul Vuh quality of its ambient score.
In particular, we see
how the importance of honour and vendetta, coupled with a distinctly
unforgiving notion of Christianity, lead to tragedy.
Katalin has
concealed the secret of her rape from her husband for ten years. He
thinks he is the father of (t)he(i)r child, Orban. When Katalin finally
confides in a trusted friend, word nevertheless gets to her husband, who
orders that they leave for shaming him. Telling Orban that his
grandmother is ill, Katalin sets off in search of revenge on the men
who have wronged her…
But if the story thus suggests a
timelessness, the omnipresence of the mobile phone – the sole piece of
(post-)modern technology present - indicates that the film is set in the
post-revolutionary present. The further tragedy, if we think about the
implied resurgence of Christianity post-communism and the officially
atheist situation during communist rule, is how little the position of
women seems to have changed over the course of two or three
generations.