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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
DELTA Backwater Hungarian hillbillies bask in the glow of stunning cinematography in Delta, a meditative film by director Kornél Mundruczó. The woe and wonder of each languorous scene is more naturally suited to photography, and, indeed, Delta feels more like an avant-garde fashion shoot or a pensive gallery show than a feature film. The plot—thin and undeveloped—may be no more than a short caption to give the passing frames a dusting of context.
The caption reads: After many years, a brooding, taciturn man (Felix Lajko) returns home on the banks of the Danube to a surly mother (Lili Monori), her latest husband (Sandor Gaspar), and a young sister (Orsolya Toth), who is instantly drawn to this blood-bound stranger. When he’s not offered to stay with his family, the man begins building a house in the middle of the river, accepting his sister’s eager help and company. With barely a word exchanged or an expression flared, their relationship slowly takes on incestuous overtones. The siblings decide to live together, and their snarling neighbours on the Danube take notice.
The evocative value of the subject matter is matched tenfold by powerful imagery used to explore it—a funeral procession of skiffs drifting along the foggy Danube, a brutal rape filmed from a paralyzed long-distance lens, a simple overhead shot of the sister supine on the floor next to a latch open to the water. These scenes are mesmerizing for their subtle artistry and finely tuned emotion.
With performances comprised mostly of inexpressive glances, it is difficult to see the actors, though all solid and thoughtfully cast, as anything but models in this gloomy landscape. In fact, looking at the film as anything but a landscape is distracting and even diminishes its impact. Taken on its own, the portentous topic simply comes on too strongly. The unorthodox magnetism between the siblings ensconced in a wooden house on the water itches for biblical significance. Yet there is no clear or intriguing reason to tell this tale, which, beside a few filled-in details, is a bare-bone template of an incest parable, with no irony, novelty, or raison d’être.
Among the few details which anchor the film in time and
place is the unflattering portrayal of the locals, whom the director
renders more and more monstrously as the story devolves. Their ugliness
and greed may be the unavoidable product of poverty and ignorance, but
their brutal behaviour represents the final moral judgment of the
masses. Yana Litovsky
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