I don't know very much about Eastern Europe. It's a part of the world that, for one reason or another, I've never visited. Many friends have gone there in recent years and have come back with stories of its incomparable beauty, both natural and urban. Whilst these stories did intrigue me, they never inspired much of a desire to visit these places themselves. Perhaps it's because in my head, I have these misjudged images of what some of these places look like. Budapest, for example: in my mind, I picture a grey city, one which lacks the charm of Prague (this is solely based on other people's accounts since I haven't been to Prague either). I can't say why this is the case, but until Thursday last week, this was my perception of it. Until I saw Walter Carvalho's 'Budapeste' (that's how it's written in Portuguese). The film begins with a voice-over speech over it's title from the protagonist José Costa (Leonardo Medeiros) telling us that many people believe Budapest is a grey city. In fact they're wrong, he tells us, Budapest is a yellow city. We suddenly cut to a wide shot from on high of the Danube and the old buildings that line its banks. Whether it's a soft sepia tone added to the shot, the warm rays of the sunset, or the actual colour of these buildings, Budapest is undoubtedly yellow. In a single shot, I've fallen in love with the city.
No doubt this was the intended effect, but as opposed to some tacky tourism advert for the city, the shot's purpose is to make us see Budapest the way our protagonist does. José Costa is a ghost writer living in Rio de Janeiro, writing other people's stories and but gaining no credit for the poetry with which he tells them. He attends an international Ghost Writers' Meeting in Budapest and finds himself enamoured by its sights and sounds, a world away from the superficial reality of Rio. He meets a girl, Kriska (Gabriella Hámori), who begins to teach him Hungarian as she simultaneously wins his heart. But soon his time there is over and he returns to Rio where he faces another client. The client's book, named 'The Gynographer' (one who studies women), becomes an overwhelming success which only fuels Costa's disgust of the industry. This disgust is, in turn, fuelled by jealousy as he puts up with his wife's (Giovanna Antonelli) derisive remarks about his work, claiming 'The Gynographer' is much better than anything he could've done. The final straw comes when Costa finds an amorous dedication in her copy of the book by the "author" himself. At a party hosted by the author/client, Costa makes a scene and tells his wife, albeit publicly, that he is the true author of the book. No longer able to face a life like this, Costa packs up and leaves for Budapest, arriving at Kriska's front door a total wreck. As he slowly starts a new life in a new place, Costa discovers a new-found admiration for the poetry that the Hungarian language offers and surrounds himself with all its intracies, be it in his work as a transcriber or his arguments with locals over pronunciation. In dealing with a constant inner struggle to express himself as an artist, Costa finds that only in Budapest, and moreover in Hungarian, can he truly do this.
Considering that the story's concerns are ownership of creative material, the authenticity of the artist, and the role of language in communication, it's not surprising that the film was based on a book. But Rita Buzzar's adaptation is conscious of the significant role language must play in the film, both spoken and written, which is very evident in the dialogue. There's a very lyrical nature to it throughout, in naturalistic scenes as well as those where it seems each word has been meticulously chosen. The photography also expresses this lyricism, with images that flow when language does or becomes jerky and hesitant like the communication between characters, such as when Costa visits Kriska's home for the first time and knows about 3 words in Hungarian.
The idea of the ghost writer is particularly important in the film, central to the narrative but also to the film as a whole; the relationship between artificial and genuine is explored in various aspects. Visually, we see a proliferation of mirror images: people's reflections often appear in the film, illustrating the possible discrepancy between perceived nature and true nature, or alluding to the façades that we all present on a daily basis. When Kriska and Costa first have sex, the entire scene is a mirror image of a previous sex scene between Costa and his wife; Carvalho makes sure that every detail in each shot is "reflected", from the way the light falls on each actress' body to the manner in which they remove their nightgowns. The character of Costa's wife also embodies the relationship between artificial and genuine as she is a TV news anchor who only cares about her perceived image. The elegant and charming personality we see onscreen bares little resemblance to the woman Costa is married to; ironically, the film shows gives nearly as much screen time to Costa's relationship with her news anchor persona as it does to her actual persona.
Far from being solely about ghost writers, 'Budapeste' is essentially a film about love, and both Hámori and Medeiros are more than convincing as the main couple. The chemistry between the two seems as natural and freeflowing as a couple who are actually developing a relationship together. Medeiros delivers another superb nuanced performance that once again confirms him as one of Brazil's leading actors. But perhaps most important of all is Budapest itself, the character that Carvalho lets shine the brightest and wins the heart of Costa as well as of the audience.
The screening I went to see was followed by a debate that included Medeiros and Carvalho, and was chaired by Fernando Meirelles (it's amazing how often he seems to pop up). The two talked at length about the film's production and gave their own interpretations, concerning both specific details and the overall purpose of the film. Medeiros spoke of the difficulty he faced with learning Hungarian, saying how it's unlike any other Western language since it has no obvious discernible roots. It has survived many invasions over centures and has remained largely intact in comparison to a language like English which is a melting pot of influences. The grammatical structure was also very difficult to understand, he said. Word order in sentences didn't follow a logic that he was used to, making it seem much more poetic to him. Throughout the film, it's stated that Hungarian is the only language the Devil respects; from what Medeiros said, it's hardly surprising.
Carvalho spoke in much more depth about the film, in particular about two moments that I'm sure everyone in the room was curious to hear about. The first one is when the actual author of the book, Chico Buarque, makes a cameo; the second one is the very last shot of the film, when the camera pans from Costa reading to Kriska and settles on a mirror showing a reflection of itself. He made the point that in fact, the two are very closely linked. Buarque's cameo would theoretically signify the presence of the truest author of all within the film, the actual author of the book; ironically, he actually becomes another ghost writer. Whilst Costa has always been the ghost writer of other people's stories, in the end it is his story that is made into book and becomes a success in Hungary. As he comes back to Budapest (I should mention that near the end of the film he is deported back to Rio but then swiftly given a permanent visa and allowed back to Budapest; I won't say why, you'll just have to watch it), he's greeted by the press and by adoring fans asking for autographs. Only he's surprised since he never wrote this book he's autographing. The book in question is 'Budapeste', the book on which the film is based and but which is diegetically based on the film. You enter a sort of cinematic-literary catch-22 at this point: none of the film could've existed without Buarque's book in the first place so evidently he's the "true" author, but then he couldn't have written the book in the film without Costa having lived it, so he's the ghost writer as well. Of course, I'm only being pedantic really. As Carvalho points out, his presence there adds another dimension to the idea of the ghost writer explored in the film: perhaps the ghost writer and the true author are one and the same.
The second point corroborates this as Carvalho states that his intention of showing the camera at the end reveals the artificiality of the film to its audience and shows Carvalho to be like Buarque: the ghost writer who tells other people's stories and the true author telling his own stories with his own characters. Someone asked how faithful Carvalho thought his film was to the book, to which he answered that it's completely subjective and ultimately a pointless question. The film is a work in itself and stands alone, even if it shares characters, places and themes with the book. But despite all this talk of authorship, I don't think the film's intention is to put the author on the pedestal; rather, it's the idea that every author simply wants to tell a story and wants people to pay attention. As Costa and Kriska demonstrate in the final scene, it's not the for the fame or the image, it's for the relationship the author has with his public, be it a reader, a viewer, or a listener, and I think Carvalho thinks much the same. The camera shot may seem like a pretentious device that would class him as a wannabe "auteur", but as he himself explained, he's always included the language of cinema in the narrative of every film he's worked on. As a director of photography first and foremost and since this is his first fiction film he's directed, it's almost logical that a camera would appear sooner or later.
To end on a somewhat unrelated note, one person in the debate questioned Carvalho's choice of actress for the role of Costa's wife, stating that as a TV soap actress, she wasn't good enough. A hushed awe descenced upon the room, as if saying, "How dare you, a mere layman, question the choice of The Filmmaker, he who knows all". It's funny to think how much people subscribe to this idea, it elevates people in the industry to absurd heights when, in the end, the opinion of a person with a filmmaking career of 30 years is just as valid as that of a builder. Carvalho answered the question about casting, saying that he wanted an actress whose look represented this vapid personality he saw in the character of Costa's wife and he thought Antonelli had that. But, as he said himself, in the end she didn't fit the part, or maybe she fit the part too well. Contrary to what most people in that room would have thought, the criticism generated an honest and direct reply rather than a tirade of some kind. As Carvalho said, he'd rather have a criticism over a compliment any day: compliments are empty and they are addictive. You hear one and you instantly forget it and want to hear another. They don't breed any sort of informative discussion, all they do is feed egos. Criticisms are the complete opposite: a single one will stick in your mind and you'll definitely take it home with you. It was certainly a breath of fresh air to hear that since it put a stop to all the sycophants in the audience chiming on about how much they loved the film. Of course, you can imagine how many people suddenly thought they had a bad thing to say about it...
