Errata
Via Chicago
—• CONTENTS •—
— Errata Movie Podcast —
2002, Hungary
director: György Pálfi

György Pálfi's debut feature lasts a mere 75 minutes, but I'd wager that a poll of viewers exiting the theater would turn up just as many explanations of what occurs during that brief window. The movie seems to document a day in the life of a rural Hungarian village. It constructs a collage of found rhythms, something akin to Koyaanisqatsi or The Man With the Movie Camera, but buried among the noises of wildlife and an old man's burps is a mystery so subtle that if you nod off at the wrong time, lulled to sleep by country life on parade, you could miss it entirely. A murder investigation unfolds wordlessly, and Pálfi gives it the same weight as a snake in the grass and children eating breakfast.

There's something fascinating about hiding one genre film inside another, a narrative inside an apparently non-narrative conceit, especially when the enclosing movie seems so orthogonal to the needs of a detective story. But Pálfi doesn't treat them as separate at all. The two ideas share a similar thirst for patterns and a desire to piece the clues together to solve a larger puzzle. Death is part of this village's life, even when it's deliberate and unwanted, and the investigation into that death isn't so different from farming. Hukkle is a quaint whodunit, a poem with a plot.

screened2003.04.26
San Francisco International Film Festival
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