Szelíd teremtés - A Frankenstein-terv

The worst thing that can happen to an (intolerant) person is to sit down and watch «Tender Son - The Frankenstein Project» expecting it to be a retelling of the story of the monster from Mary Shelley's novel. The intolerant will surely find it horrifying, as did the "critics" of the American film industry magazines The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, who were thinking of Boris Karloff while watching a 17-year-old monster.

Of course, it does not help that it is based on a play of the same name by the Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, who has said on more than one occasion that it is an adaptation of Shelley's novel. If we are a little more curious about it than the Reporter and the Variety, it certainly is. The creature created by a man, with his own contributions and those of a hardened mother; the abandonment of the creature, who becomes a strange, impulsive young man who cannot distinguish right from wrong; and then the deaths... But while Shelley's novel introduces elements of fantasy and sensationalism, this is an austere drama.

A filmmaker (Mundruczó himself) is planning a new film. In an opening scene, he confesses that he has been searching for his ideal actor for two years, then he holds auditions on Christmas Eve, and suddenly, everything turns into something worse than a nightmare... The nightmare leaves you open to the possibility that you have dreamed it all. Not here. Nothing that happens (and everything is heavy stuff) can be undone. The consequence of the last incident is predictable, but the film lasts just 5 or 6 minutes more and concludes... You are left feeling the final blow, knowing there is no way out.

«Tender Son» is a good drama, disturbing, perceptive, compassionate, and I cannot disagree more with the Reporter and the Variety, who were looking (like good pseudo-critics) for psychologisms, motivations, journeys, arcs, heroes, limits... I feel that the impression has changed a bit since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 15 years ago, and it has become something else, a death rite, as Baron Frankenstein's creature liked it, or perhaps a cult film, like other works by Mundruczó.

This little drama tends to keep everything simple yet mysterious. It all comes down to psychological aspects. If you are looking for action or a massive scale destruction, this is a wrong address. But if you enjoy small scaled, almost intimate drama, this is something to go for. You won't find any of those cheesy characters you all know so well here. They wouldn't fit in this deep and sad story about family bonds and relationships between mother, her son and all the other characters. Project Frankenstein is revolving around the main protagonist Rudy, who finds himself not to be welcome home and still have questions about his father whom he never knew. The pacing and whole atmosphere reminded me of another great Hungarian movie - Kontroll. Hungarian directors tend to have a very special feel for telling a story without revealing too much too soon. Director Kornel Mundruczo did his work right and brought to life characters that are vivid and believable. I can only recommend this interesting project to everyone who loves dramas revolving around moral dilemmas, family values and relationships. You probably wouldn't find any better this year.

I can imagine that people, misled by "Frankenstein" in the title, will move on and find some other film, having seen enough horror movies in their youth, and cannot take any more. They are wrong. There are more elements of a tragedy. A pity that the synopsis contained no hints in this direction.

This is the movie equivalent of a thriller book, the page turner variant. All the usual elements are there: a large, nearly empty house, family relations that are not immediately revealed, dead bodies for no apparent reason, and much more. The missing element here is the all knowing, all seeing detective. That is on purpose, though, since the whodunit routine is irrelevant.

From the start I was taken away by the story, the people and the location. That there is no real plot is part of the game (this game). Steadily paced developments are going in unexpected directions, which is (again) part of the game. It glued me to my seat for the full 105 minutes.

The ending was a bit unexpected. I do not want to advertise myself as a script writer, but I could have added sufficient material for an extra half hour, if only to make it a real Greek tragedy. On the other hand, the producers may have a sequel in mind, and leave all options open for that reason.

The picture is becoming a little clearer with Kornél Mundruczó's work, this is his third feature containing brother and sister characters with incestuous feelings (following "Delta" and "Pleasant Days"). To me it felt very much a personal expression as opposed to anything particularly approaching universality. As with the protagonist from Delta, the "boy" (Rudolf Frecska) in this film returns from a distant institution where he's been conveniently forgotten about for many years. He arrives back home and seeks out his "creators". The Frankenstein's Monster of this movie is an unsocialised youth, he's had no mentor, and no love, a blank shell of a man with unchecked needs and desires; he needs to eat, he wants to mate, and he has to find out who created him.

Something that I like about the movie, but which is very hard to express cinematically is that it acknowledges that emotions and their expression are very separate. Film has always been about emotional expression, that for me anyway is one of the great lures, you see people who feel what you feel and the tears run down their faces; actors under this perspective are expert emoters. The "boy" here displays what psychologists call blunted affect, which means that he doesn't display emotional responses. This is usually the result of post-traumatic stress disorder; one can only imagine what happened at the orphanage or asylum or whatever institutions he has been through. It's therefore very hard for the viewer to connect, most people don't interpret emotion in any other context than emotional display, if someone cries they are sad, if they don't, they're not. This is something that can work well in a novel, but in a film is alienating.

It doesn't help that Mundruczó himself is playing the other main character, a film director, it's true that he's just playing a version of himself, but it's not how film grammar works, Fellini didn't go in front of the camera in 8 1/2, he used Marcelo Mastroianni. I have to be uncharitable and say that Mundruczó looks like a brute, it's perhaps a healthy thing to have film grammar (which in this case is really a type of fascism) upset, but it's not going to help this film get distribution.

When there's an audition for non-professional actors, some of the people there are very real, they're alexithymic, or out out of touch with their emotions. It's a healthy thing to see in a movie.

Something that Mundruczó has definitely demonstrated so far is that he has a command of look, quite overtly with Delta. Tender Son is shot very professionally with a cold beauty that reminded me very much of another Cannes "In Competition" black sheep of personal cinema, Tsai Ming-liang's "Visage" of a year before.

One great success of this film is that despite the unambiguously modern setting it somehow really does have the feel of the Romantic era, and that's no small feat. I'm no scholar of this sort of thing, but it may be to do with lack of exposition in the film, with a kind of tunnel-visioned lack of extraneity, and with a Romantic sense of nature.

Flies preserved in amber are fascinating in exactly the same way as this film, it's slow and it feels as if a personal childhood trauma of the director is being solidified in amber. When the camera does move, it's in a resinous drip. Key engrams are preserved, the simple banal beauty of an optic fibre lamp, a decadent tactile meal of peach halves (cf. the devouring of watermelon in Delta) in syrup, the slow drop of snow-flakes.

I fully expect the movie to sink without a trace, grief fixation and Genetic Sexual Attraction hardly being hooks to get bums on seats. However I think if anyone had a personal connection to this film, then it would speak volumes to them.

I saw this film on IFFR 2011 in Rotterdam, and even though a little while ago, I still remember it very clearly. In fact, I thought it was the best film I have seen on the whole festival.

Tender Son is a very, very strong film, with strong emotions from an unwelcome cast-away son and his family who coincidentally returns to them.

With 'disturbing' as one of the emotions that is most present while watching the film, it is not a popular film (some people walked out during the screening), which is a pity.

To think of this movie as a thriller, or horror movie and watch it with these expectations would be wrong. I would say it has much more in common with films such as Antichrist by Lars von Trier or Das weisse Band by Michael Haneke.

If you can stomach these films and the emotion 'disturbing' this film is a 10, in intensity, stills, story, in everything. It is one I would recommend and look forward to seeing again.