Delta (2008)

Delta seems to be one of those films that is shown on a couple of film festivals and is subsequently sent off to mould in movie archives. Then again, Finnish TV showed it a few months ago. To my pleasure, because this is a quite good film.

The young director, Kornél Mundruczó, is mostly in charge of what s/he does here. It's an artistically successful movie: visually stunning, great scenery (the Danube delta), great work with colors, mostly unostentatious acting (but maybe not through-and-through convincing). Interestingly, Mundruczó is the person responsible for the horrendous Johanna, which I reviewed a while ago. Arguably, his work has an inclination towards the controversial. In Johanna, that proved to be a bad thing. With regards to Delta, I'm not sure what to say.

Mihail returns to the village where his mother, new boyfriend & half-sister lives. He has saved some money to build a house on the river delta on land owned by his late father. His sister goes to live with him and it turns out the bond between them is not limited to the Hegelian/Platonic purity of brother/sister relationship. There are some twists along the way and right from the start, I have a hunch something bad is bound to happen. There's a heavy feeling of tragic foreboding in these images, regardless of what they depict: beautiful landscapes, the peaceful ploddings of a turtle. 

There are weaknesses in how the story unfolds & in how it is developed. Some scenes are ingeniously shot with long, swirling takes, but not complex enough in terms of content. But that doesn't bother me too much. It was an interesting film that managed to stick to its aesthetic ideas - even though it is clearly inspired by the great Béla Tarr, it didn't end up being intrusively derivative. Mundruszó doesn't play in Tarr's league with this film but the visual poetry it creates is still quite marvellous.

Some things bother me, though, and, as in Johanna, it concerns Mundruczó's interest in female sexuality. To some extent, he shows awareness of patriarchal society & the kind of repression and violence it exerts. But maybe the problem is that the elements of violence runs the risk of becoming a mere visual shock disrupting the languid pace of the film - that Mundruczó is more interested in scenery and people end up being mere dramatic prop? But that is not entirely true.