'Tegnap' / 'Yesterday' is the 2018 debut in feature film of Hungarian filmmaker Bálint Kenyeres. A late debut, he being already known as an actor, screenwriter and author of short films, and which has not yet been followed by a second film. It's a Hungarian film, but it has nothing to do with Hungary, not a word of Hungarian is spoken, the story takes place in Morocco and is spoken in French, English, German, Arabic. Vlad Ivanov, the huge Romanian actor, appears in the lead role. He is also the main reason why I decided to see the film. I was left with a lot of question marks at the end of the viewing, but that was probably exactly the intention of the screenwriters and of the director.
Victor Ganz is a European businessman, the head of a large construction company, who travels to Morocco to fix a project that seems to have some problems. He seems like a confident guy who controls everything that happens in his business and life. The trip is also a return, he had been to Morocco twenty years ago, he has friends and relations here at ministerial level. The evening before returning, unable to sleep, he goes to a bar where he had been many years ago. Here he seems to glimpse the silhouette of a woman he had known and had a love affair with, a woman with whom he was supposed to go back to Europe, but who had disappeared without a trace from a motel on the seashore and the edge of the desert. He goes in pursuit of her, and from here begins a journey in which the present and the past, reality and delusion will mix to the point of total confusion. Morocco is no longer the one he knew, people have changed, communication is difficult or even impossible, the language barrier is amplified by differences in cultures, mentalities and symbols. The man secure and in control of every detail of life gradually turns into an obsessed man, unsure if he is in the present or the past, in conflict with the surrounding people and the desert and the merciless sun.
Where many other filmmakers would use flashbacks, Bálint Kenyeres keeps the narrative all the time in the present. Victor, his hero, has few clues to the past - a few weathered photographs and unreliable memories. The story is told from his perspective, but the hero's insecurities about the time he is in, the fate of the woman he is looking for, and his own identity are conveyed to the viewer. He may feel confused at many moments, even at the end, when a possible solution to the mystery of the woman's disappearance is told in a language he does not understand and which the director chose not to subtitle. But the confusion is intentional. The return to the present is only apparent. He who has lived his youth intensely remains in part the prisoner of past - this seems to be the message. Vlad Ivanov is formidable, as we know him. When Ivanov plays a role, we cannot imagine the character otherwise or another actor in his place. He plays the part of the foreigner in three or four languages, and that suits him perfectly, for none of them is his home language. The overwhelming cinematography, signed by Ádám Fillenz, reproduces the atmosphere of ruin in the desert and transmits the merciless climate beyond the screen. 'Teglap' / 'Yesterday' is a film that will appeal to lovers of cinematic experiments and psychological dramas, a film that will intrigue and puzzle many.
