politian

This superb film draws on a variety of talented actors and musicians at the top of their form - Levant, Crosby, Martin, Rathbone, Manone are completely at home in the story that apparently was supplied by Billy Wilder. One would love to know more about how much he had to do with it, because it's an exceptionally clever variation on the sterile master/fertile servant tale - nearly an allegory of the entertainment industry, run by dried-up numskulls, but made into a vibrant world of art and play by an exploited underclass of nobodies and non-WASPs. Looking at the last six decades of music, TV, and film in the US, it's hard not to see the underlying insights of this film as prophetic.

I'm not sure a more challenging film has been made. Fekete, director of Bolshe Vita, itself a complex and difficult undertaking, went beyond what we think of as manageable material with Chico. Blurring fact and fiction, uniting a story told through 25 years in 5 nations, or almost-nations, or nations in the process of becoming, unified by the improbable story of an impossible man whose credibility lies in the fact that he is portraying himself, masterfully, honestly, fragmentarily. This is a film of genius by a filmmaker who is not satisfied unless she is on the trail of something very large, very real -- the only other filmmakers I can think of that approach this are the early Rossellini and the early Cassavetes. I would welcome further information on this director and how she managed to make this film.

The film is original on many levels. Released in 1996, based upon the brief window of "openness" in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe in 1989, offering contrasting glimpses of the time before and after. Questioning not only the east (Russia), but also the alternative, as proles from Russia, Hungary, and the West mingle in a suspended state, confused about what to do, and how to do it, in a world from which autocracy has suddenly, without preparation, been subtracted. The characters are each sharply drawn, convincingly played, by actors of great talent. In some sense the highly focused lens, following two Russian street musicians (whose musical styles even conflict) through their brief introduction to the middle ground between East and West in Budapest, explodes with the energy of the larger story in which it is enveloped - leaving a strong sense of arbitrary forces leading to resolutions which are anything but "storybook" in tone and sense of closure. Apparently the film grew out of the director's earlier experiences making a documentary about an actual pair of Russian musicians.