Treasure City review – bizarre, oppressive and horribly brutal | Film
A one-night-in-the-city film from Hungary with an ensemble forged interconnecting and interrelating in bizarrely sudden methods; the town in query is probably Budapest, although it was filmed in Cluj, in Romania. The keynotes are anger, confusion and despair, and to a point the movie may have been opaque or contrived however its malaise in the end finds expression in a really horrible #MeToo second, some of the brutally believable and unsettling I’ve seen in any movie just lately.
The forged are varied: the organisers of a protest in opposition to the reactionary authorities have a row over competency, and an affiliate of theirs has a romantic second with a Mohawk-haired teen son of a sourly depressed pastor and his offended spouse. A lady has a livid row with a impolite and supercilious gross sales assistant in a flower store. Her husband is enraged to listen to of a tragic romantic escapade up to now and their 10-year-old daughter seems to have magic powers. They’ve a hyperlink with an intimate and experimental “front room theatre” troupe whose deeply disagreeable director is a predatory rapist, furnishing this film with the climactically horrendous scene close to the tip. And so it goes on, with the assorted lives enjoying out kind of concurrently.
That is an odd movie, opaque and withdrawn, and with a muted and discreet type of surrealism, significantly in its cafe scenes, that jogged my memory a bit of administrators resembling Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismäki, solely with out the emollient contact of comedy. Numerous the film is oppressively sexualised, in ways in which create a charged and harmful environment, but additionally one way or the other unrewarding. The place is all of it main? That isn’t clear, although the abuse scene appears to develop like a darkish flower from the estrangement and unhappiness that has gone earlier than.
Treasure Metropolis is in cinemas and on digital platforms from 18 June.
