I took a punt on this one needing out of the house on a holiday Monday. It was short enough, ranked in certain quarters as a classic, and had made it onto those most worthy of cinéaste lists as an undeservedly overlooked masterpiece. It sounded like one of those films, like Koyaanisqatsi, that, like Twain's classics, everyone wants to have watched and nobody much wants to watch; one which I would sit through with a lot of deep and meaningful thoughts in my mind, which would stay with me for years but be approximately as enjoyable as the last three fifths of all those long form essays on climate change, crypto currencies or the situation in the Ukraine I mean to get round to. Some of the write ups on it made it sound as if there was barely any dialogue.
In fact, though the dialogue is reasonably sparse, there are few long scenes without any dialogue. Indeed it is important enough that the subtitles caused me problems. I have been watching films with Czech subtitles for a few years now and have few problems with that from a language point of view. What I do tend to notice, though, is that the comprehensibility of subtitles varies widely. Sometimes subtitles flash up and are cancelled so quickly you don't have time to scan them. This can be the case even where they are not replaced with others. The viewer in these films begins to distrust the subtitles and scans the text quicker than is natural, taking little in even in those moments where the subtitles remain in place. This is far more often a problem than the poor idiom often seen in Czech subtitles. I don't know much about the technology of subtitles, but it looked as if the text was applied to the copy of the film in this instance, probably many years ago, and being essentially burned into the film itself, parts of the text disappeared for a number of frames. I missed a number of exchanges because of this and would like to watch the film again with English subtitles for this reason.
I'm in two minds, too, about the need to read up on the background of the film beforehand. As with a Forward in a classic novel, I find that knowing too much about a film before first seeing it can detract from its immediacy. With The Round-up, though, I might perhaps have benefited from knowing a little more. At least with a film, and certainly a film of this length, I can see it again more easily than I might find time to read a Victorian novel.
Knowing as little as I did about the background, however, it is certainly true that was plenty to keep my interest, both on the human level (which in places I would have understood better had the subtitles been a touch better), and on the visual level. As far as the human level goes, there are scenes here that could gainfully be projected in lectures on game theory and the prisoner's dilemma. The psychological methods used by the captors are brutally effective and it is impossible to watch without thinking how well you would fare in such circumstances. Purely aesthetically, both the landscape here and the people are so full of character. János Gajdar's face is just one of those that fills the screen and though stoic, almost static much of the time, speaks of many years of rough breaks and a dangerous contained emotion.
They don't make films like this anymore in part because they don't make men like that anymore.
