The title is irresistible. The film not so much. Vet Hungarian editor Éva Gárdos was near 70 when she jumped to feature directing on this old-school murder mystery, swapping out police or private detectives for a hard-nosed newspaper reporter, joined at the hip by his on-and-off photog gal pal just back from Nazi Germany. So when a prostitute’s suicide starts looking more like defenestration, and a chain of contacts leads to thugs, madames, a pulchritude portraitist, prominent civil servants & wealthy private citizens, somebody’s got to ask the tough questions . . . and risk getting clobbered. Hard to miss capturing just the right atmosphere for this type of thing in the backstreets, bridges & architectural gems of Budapest, and the plot twists from the late András Szekér’s novel still have a flavorsome kick to them and even add up logically. (No small thing in this genre.) If only the cast didn’t feel so up-to-date; the style so generic; the clothes so off-the-rack. Leading lady Réka Tenki has real period style in her sweetly asymmetrical face, but everyone else is strictly LAW AND ORDER: BUDAPEST, especially leading man Krisztián Kolovratnik, whose heavy stubble changes in every scene. Little things like that really matter in such an overworked genre; like Atti Pacsay’s award-winning cool jazz background score that sounds a decade off, more ‘40's/‘50s than ‘30s. But ignore production gaffes to be rewarded with a third act that’s atypically well-prepared and tidy for the form.
READ ALL ABOUT IT: To see how to do these things for a modern audience, try the Philip Kerr series of Nazi-era Berlin detective novels featuring police detective Bernie Gunther. The first three now out together as BERLIN NOIR (hmm, catchy title!) and the later books only get better. Why they’ve not been picked up for film beyond me.
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