Gyorgy Palfi, the Hungarian director of the highly original Hukkle, tells three stories in his second feature, a brilliantly basilisk-eyed commentary on the human condition that is misanthropic enough to send tender souls out of the cinema early.
The first story has a simple-minded Second World War orderly whose sexual fantasies, expressed by persistent masturbation, are eventually sated by bedding the copiously fleshed wife of his domineering boss on top of a slaughtered pig. Her furious husband shoots him dead, but a baby is produced with a pig's tail.
The second story is about the baby, who has now grown up to become a national speed-eating champion. He gets lockjaw, marries another speedeater and has a baby.
The baby, in the third story, becomes a taxidermist tending his now immobile father, who is ultimately eaten by his cats. He stuffs his dad and then climbs into an elaborate machine to commit scientifically arranged suicide. The first and third stories are grotesque in a typically Middle European way, matching realism with the surreal. The second, if you can stand the vomitarium which the speedeaters use to get rid of what they have just swallowed, is pretty funny.
What is most impressive is Palfi's imagination and the way he develops it on the screen. Gross-out it may be, but there's rather more to it.
Taxidermia
Cert: 18
