Review//Katalin Varga//Dazed and Confused

originally published in the May issue of Dazed and Confused
Katalin Varga
By Jesi Khadivi

The moral landscape mirrors the physical in Katalin Varga, a minimal and elegant revenge film shot in Transylvania’s Carpathian mountains. The plot is straight forward: Katalin was raped before the film’s action begins, resulting in the conception of her son Orbán. 11 years hence, her husband learns her secret and Katalin sets off on horseback, seeking vengeance. It’s a timeless tale, set in primordial landscape of rolling hills and dank mist. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s unsentimental view of nature, Greek born UK director, Peter Strickland, has crafted a gripping feature-length debut brimming with complexity, intelligence and ambiguity.

Although the project was five years in the making, actual shooting time was only seventeen days and Strickland’s budget was less than 30,000. The film was made with his own money and without any professional backing “The fear of failure was huge,” Strickland admits. Katalin Varga premiered to critical acclaim at the Berlinale Film Festival in February. However, critics looking for pat commentary on rape or Hungarian-Romanian tensions were frustrated to find few answers from a director more interested in exploring the twin themes of revenge and redemption.

“The idea of revenge is quite compelling,” first time director Peter Strickland told me in a Potsdamer Platz cafe , “There are no resolutions. Revenge is the one crime we can all relate to.” The recent popular resurgence of genre filmmaking confirms Strickland’s point; its explosive popularity is largely due to directors like Quentin Tarantino, whose Kill Bill films mash-up elements of martial arts, western and revenge films. “I wanted to take a pulp genre and transport it into another context,” Strickland says, “You don’t need to be Tarantino to do that.” As a pulp inspired film, Varga has little in common with Kill Bill. Revenge is rendered in broad strokes and explored through ideas of causality, redemption and forgiveness. Varga’s characters are more morally indeterminate than their pop-revenge films counterparts. Throughout the film, the boundaries between right and wrong and justice and injustice are continuously blurred. Like the best noir anti-heroes, Katalin and Antal, the man who raped her, have complicated, fractured psyches. Katalin has suffered a grave injustice, but is also a murder. Antal brutally raped Katalin, violating the sanctity of another human being, yet over the course of a decade he evolved into a sensitive man and a loving husband.

Though Strickland says the story could be told anywhere, its Transylvanian setting is inextricably linked to the film’s artistry. Strickland wisely chose a location capable of evoking the beauty and terror of personal and spiritual transformation. However, he’s careful to point out that the film’s themes are universal. “This could never be an authentic Transylvanian film,” he told reporters after the film’s premiere, “I’m English. I didn’t want to go the Kusturica route, which is a bit bombastic. I wanted to make something more like a ballad.”