After The Day Before - Másnap

A man gets a lift on a pickup into a small rural village, the scenery of which is dominated by scattered run-down houses, slopes, hills, creaks, swaying grass. The man walks around, indeed, sometimes he is moving around on a rusty bicycle, looking for a house he has inherited. He meets a lot of people; mostly strange, evil and conspiring people engaged in heated arguments. The man is told about the murder of a local girl. The events are slowly revealed.

In essence, this is the plot of Másnap, a Hungarian movie from 2004 directed by Attila Janisch. It is a peculiar film, but not only because of its fragmented storytelling - what distinguishes this film from other experiments with chronology is its quite unusual portrait of landscape and human beings. One of my associations when watching the film was The Reflecting skin by Philip Ridley. Not only did the films share a fetisch for swaying cornfields and landscape in general, in both films did the landscape have an eerie dreamlike and surreal glow. A constant feeling of unease and foreboding characterizes Ridley's film as well as Janosch's.

Tarkovsky's Stalker shares the same quality and he develops it to perfection (I remember one scene particularly well in which the Stalker lies on the muddy ground and looks at the grass and at a puddle, then a dog come along...). In Stalker, the landscape is portrayed as living things, life which of course creates a beautiful, paradoxical contrast within the post-apocalyptic setting of the film. In Másnap, the same kind of contrasts are employed, at least partially.

The sense of something inherently surreal in Másnap is difficult to pinpoint, as it has nothing to do with what goes on at the surface (in one sense). The perspective of the film, and the way the protagonist is presented to us, is deceivingly detached to the effect that both the landscape and persons turn into passive objects, contemplated, witnessed, but not more than that. But the deception of this perception/perspective is, and this is interesting, emphasized by the film itself. Somebody on IMBD talked about this film being a version of a story by Robbe-Grillet, which makes sense to me after having watched it.

Many scenes seem to focus on the associations, perception and expectations of the viewer and in this way the film inherits much from the play with suspense in the horror movie genre. If done in excess, this type of ploy would come out as annoying mannerism and there are perhaps some moments in the film which are unnecessarily enigmatic, but they are, I would say, rare. The enigmas of the films mostly have a striking and unsettling effect, which admittedly has less to do with story than with atmosphere (for me, that is).

But for some reason I can't quite make up my mind about this film. The scenes towards the end can be said to make the film more interesting, developing the theme of voyerism, but it can also be argued that these resuming scenes were both shallow and deeply tasteless.