At the end of the war in a village on the border, two brothers fight for their survival, studying evil and its sources. The only sure way to cope with the brutal world of adults and the war they have been drawn into is to become completely insensitive. Thus, they develop a training plan for the soul and body to free themselves from hunger, pain and emotions and learn to endure future difficulties. As a result, they become completely indifferent to the value of human life and are able to commit murder without any doubt.
This is a film adaptation of the first part, a trilogy of the book of the same name by Agote Christoph & #39; Fat Notebook'. Despite the complexity, the filmmakers managed to capture its essence, creating a universally understandable parable of inhumanity catalyzed by war and the division of post-war Europe.
Like the book, the film strives for a dark, fabulous tone that, despite the development of characters and changing feelings, remains without emotion. It also deliberately avoids mentioning specific geographical names and nationalities.
I will refrain from making recommendations. This film is really very dark, cruel and real. It is often criticized for its duality, although for me it is rather a virtue because the viewer himself determines his attitude to what is happening. There are no bad or good characters in the film, just people (without names), just Grandma, Father, Mother and a story told by two twin brothers.
Dramaturgical exposition of the film "The Fat Notebook" 2013, shot by one of the brightest and most famous representatives of the new Hungarian cinema Janos Sas, which consists in how on the eve of the end of the Second World, the misguided mother sent her two 13-year-old twin offspring to the village to her grandmother, even more unattractive, can be called quite characteristic of the whole space of European cinema about the war, because, so it happened that in Europe - mainly Western and Northern, while the Eastern one began to join this trend - the dominant the the the war masters, who are not yet part of salvation from the present war, who are not so quickly conquered and the world, because they are not so quickly saved from the world, but are not so much from the world's war, because they are not so quickly conquered by the world's war. In fact, the Fat Notebook, the plot of which dates back to the novel of the same name by the writer Agatha Christoph, the first of the whole trilogy and, perhaps, the toughest in its realism, initially seems to be a kind of extrapolation of a purely magical-realistic and escapist in the spirit of Book Thieves and intentionally, as it turned out later, the mystification of Survive Among the Wolves, since the identity of the plots, albeitated and minimized, is obvious - children are taken away from nightmares, from war, or are felt completely from the world. And the view on it is given not mature, wise, but from the side of children who do not yet distinguish tastes and shades, which, naturally, the war does change. For the better.
However, Janos Sas prefers to destroy the usual predictability, shooting his film is not at all in the canons and traditions of any war films. Like the book, The Fat Notebook is an oppressive and exhausting narrative, both physiologically and mentally, completely devoid of the husks of pathetics or heroics, and as a result, hovering not only in intergenre space, but also in moral space, for Janos Saz, building a narrative foundation of hardships and unbearable suffering, does not seek to give a light for his central juvenile heroes who fell from one hellish existence to another, even more terrifying, but even simply cuts off any hope for the best. For Sas, “The Fat Notebook” became the third appeal to the topic of war and crimes committed on it, after purely documentary, in some ways deliberately abstract, declarative and poster according to the intonations of “The Eye of the Holocaust” and “Interrupted Silence” – and at the same time the most provocative at least after the fact that the film reigns undivided evil and absolute cruelty, apocalyptic nightmare and dementia. On both the aesthetic and the subconscious level, the Fat Notebook becomes a marginal ode to dehumanization, a gloomy portrait in the tones of Hieronymus Bosch and Franz Kafka (after all, the theme of loneliness and the progressive transformation of a still immature human unit into a feelingless monster, rejected and abandoned is more than convex) of a dying society. But dying not so much from the fires of war that spread throughout Europe, for often even there a person tried to remain a man, not descending to the animal level, but from his own unwillingness, from unbearable passivity to preserve this human face in conditions of extreme changes that spare no one and never change. And this universal doom, played out in the deceptively pastoral space of a single village by 13-year-old twins, metaphorically depicting both the biblical Cain and Abel, and the dichotomy of human essence as such, Janos Saz literally revels. Sometimes without measure, without frames, skillfully immersing the audience in an almost otherworldly and at the same time hyperrealistic world of war, seen by children who by the end no longer are such. Having stiffened their souls, dead in their hearts, seeing only cruelty and violence without the right to salvation, they themselves become embodied ideals of misanthropy. Entering the path of Klimov’s “Go and See,” in which, despite all the monumental naturalism and apocalyptic physiology, there was catharsis, light was given, Janos Saz preferred darkness. It is so thick and all-encompassing that you can inadvertently choke and suffocate in it, as in a gas chamber.
Dramaturgical exposition of the film "The Fat Notebook" 2013, shot by one of the brightest and most famous representatives of the new Hungarian cinema Janos Sas, which consists in how on the eve of the end of the Second World, the misguided mother sent her two 13-year-old twin offspring to the village to her grandmother, even more unattractive, can be called quite characteristic of the whole space of European cinema about the war, because, so it happened that in Europe - mainly Western and Northern, while the Eastern one began to join this trend - the dominant the the the war masters, who are not yet part of salvation from the present war, who are not so quickly conquered and the world, because they are not so quickly saved from the world, but are not so much from the world's war, because they are not so quickly conquered by the world's war. In fact, the Fat Notebook, the plot of which dates back to the novel of the same name by the writer Agatha Christoph, the first of the whole trilogy and, perhaps, the toughest in its realism, initially seems to be a kind of extrapolation of a purely magical-realistic and escapist in the spirit of Book Thieves and intentionally, as it turned out later, the mystification of Survive Among the Wolves, since the identity of the plots, albeitated and minimized, is obvious - children are taken away from nightmares, from war, or are felt completely from the world. And the view on it is given not mature, wise, but from the side of children who do not yet distinguish tastes and shades, which, naturally, the war does change. For the better.
However, Janos Sas prefers to destroy the usual predictability, shooting his film is not at all in the canons and traditions of any war films. Like the book, The Fat Notebook is an oppressive and exhausting narrative, both physiologically and mentally, completely devoid of the husks of pathetics or heroics, and as a result, hovering not only in intergenre space, but also in moral space, for Janos Saz, building a narrative foundation of hardships and unbearable suffering, does not seek to give a light for his central juvenile heroes who fell from one hellish existence to another, even more terrifying, but even simply cuts off any hope for the best. For Sas, “The Fat Notebook” became the third appeal to the topic of war and crimes committed on it, after purely documentary, in some ways deliberately abstract, declarative and poster according to the intonations of “The Eye of the Holocaust” and “Interrupted Silence” – and at the same time the most provocative at least after the fact that the film reigns undivided evil and absolute cruelty, apocalyptic nightmare and dementia. On both the aesthetic and the subconscious level, the Fat Notebook becomes a marginal ode to dehumanization, a gloomy portrait in the tones of Hieronymus Bosch and Franz Kafka (after all, the theme of loneliness and the progressive transformation of a still immature human unit into a feelingless monster, rejected and abandoned is more than convex) of a dying society. But dying not so much from the fires of war that spread throughout Europe, for often even there a person tried to remain a man, not descending to the animal level, but from his own unwillingness, from unbearable passivity to preserve this human face in conditions of extreme changes that spare no one and never change. And this universal doom, played out in the deceptively pastoral space of a single village by 13-year-old twins, metaphorically depicting both the biblical Cain and Abel, and the dichotomy of human essence as such, Janos Saz literally revels. Sometimes without measure, without frames, skillfully immersing the audience in an almost otherworldly and at the same time hyperrealistic world of war, seen by children who by the end no longer are such. Having stiffened their souls, dead in their hearts, seeing only cruelty and violence without the right to salvation, they themselves become embodied ideals of misanthropy. Entering the path of Klimov’s “Go and See,” in which, despite all the monumental naturalism and apocalyptic physiology, there was catharsis, light was given, Janos Saz preferred darkness. So thick and comprehensive that it is inadvertently possible to choke and suffocate in it, as in a gas chamber.
8 out of 10
Even before entering the Oscar race, this tape was the winner at the prestigious film festival in Karlovy Vary. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Agote Christoph, first published in 1986, translated into thirty-three languages and repeatedly transferred to the stage. He offers a Nietzschean-infused story of two 13-year-old twins reliving World War II nightmares with their unfriendly grandmother in the village. János Sás, one of the leaders of modern Hungarian cinema, seeks to generously metaphorize the events experienced not only by two young heroes, but also by his home country. However, the imagery to which he resorts, for the most part, looks defiant.
Using symbols, allegories and metaphors, Sass masks his interest in the forbidden and immoral. This suggests that his goal was to show the war in a way that no one had ever done before. Therefore, the director, concerned with stylistic ambitions, chooses a sophisticated format, not devoid of pretentious aestheticization. He makes a frankly decadent film about almost total degradation, a movie where almost all the characters are overtaken by death, a movie without faith and hope, and therefore without love. However, to be completely fair, perhaps his only sympathies go to the two main characters, whom he still leaves alive, but he clearly does not feel much optimism about this.
On the one hand, Sás is the successor of the great traditions of Hungarian auteur cinema, laid down by classics - Szabo, Fabry, Jancho, on the other - their obvious overthrower. The fact that this director gravitates towards a perverse reflection of being became obvious after his first works. From the film, a set of brutal rides passes into the film, which here finally end the humanistic traditions of cinema on the theme of “war through the eyes of children”. It seems that these traditions will now forever remain in the past: “Ivan’s Childhood” or, for example, “Dumpsters” after “The Fat Notebook” may seem like legends of antiquity, opening the giant chasm that separates the cinema of directors of the twentieth century (personally survived the war) and those who came to replace them and only heard or read about the war.
Compared to Ivan’s Childhood, Sass doesn’t see war as a tragedy. He sees it as a series of brutal initiations that two young creatures must go through. He is not so much interested in behavioral psychology as in physiology. His twin brothers are the new Spartans, who for some reason, despite all the adversity, are deprived of fears and as a result of childhood injuries. In difficult living conditions, they themselves invent austerity: not only that they refuse food, but also mutate each other aki members of the “fight club”. Everyone gets on the nuts from Sas: so Soviet soldiers he shows not so much as liberators, but as monsters of vice, who raped to death a disabled girl. However, not in the best light exposed and the German officer, who is interested not only in men, but also boys.
In general, the Sass War is an extreme situation that helps bring out the lowest human qualities. “The Fat Notebook” is only the first part of Agote Christoph’s trilogy, but according to the initiates, the next two books – “Proof” and “Third Lies” – leave much more reason for spiritual and emotional optimism. However, the question is: will spirit-lifting novels become the reason for new film adaptations?
According to the reading of Agote Christoph’s brilliant novel, the impossibility of its full adaptation, including those two parts that follow the initial one and are called “Proof” and “Third Lies”, is a decided matter, and, confirming the assumptions, the film of Janos Sas relies on the first part of it, the comprehension of which, in isolation from the rest of the text, becomes an occupation devoid of any kind of success.
There are more uncertainties here than in the written history, fragmented here into short passages repeating the themes and contents of literary chapters, rewritten into a thick notebook that has become a diary - a biography of boys - teenagers sent to a feisty grandmother to wait out the war while their father is at war and their mother is interrupted in the city.
Naked war flaws of human natures adorn the natural and unnatural colors of their different characters, defaming honor, and degrading, forming a series of oppressive scenes of violence and shamelessness, conditionally broken into stages of voluntary trials, strengthening the body and will of twins - brothers, whom, remembering the beginning of the picture, the father decided to separate.
Nevertheless, with due attention to detail, this movie quickly ceases to be a chronicle of harsh survival against the backdrop of eternal hunger, vile debauchery and decaying human souls, acquiring the features of a psychological thriller that arises in a war-inflamed childish imagination, which leads the hand of a boy filling the notebook pages with revelations of fantasies and secret desires designed to deceive the loneliness carefully hidden behind the multiple “we”, completely displacing the names of both boys, in whose words other people are defined by jobs, professions, and a nightmare that is so close to the heart of the righte, which the child can be.