VAKVAGANY

(DEAD END)

A Film By Benjamin Meade

"In Budapest, Hungary, a man with a moving truck helps two middle-aged siblings relocate and steals a box of home movies from their belongings. The film reels are then sold to a visiting independent filmmaker from the United States who returns home and views them only to find them too good to be 'amateur.' Much of the family footage contains short narratives impersonating cinema as well as several images that would ordinarily be considered inappropriate for filming. There are also several reels of the father at work in what is apparently a government position documenting the inventory of jewelry and other personal property following WW II.

"The filmmaker puts together a production crew and returns to Hungary to track down the two siblings in an attempt to answer questions about the film's content. Both the son and daughter are found living chaotic and separate lives of drunkenness and mental illness.

"With new film material in hand, the filmmaker returns to the United States and invites three professionals (James Ellroy, Stan Brakhage, and Dr. Roy Menninger) to experience the old and the new material and offer their own interpretations."

The film run 86 minutes, and can now be purchased on DVD at Amazon.com.

Dream Nebula (1999) The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (1998), The KAN Film Festival (1998), The Boston Underground Film Festival (2000), The Midwest Harvest Arts Festival (1999)

Privilege (2000) The New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (2001), Deep Ellum Film Festival (2000), The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (2000), The KAN Film Festival (2000), The Denver Film Festival (2001), The Midwest Harvest Arts Festival (2001), The Southern Hungarian Film Festival (2001, 2002).

Bailar (To Dance) (2001) The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (2001), The Southern Hungarian Film Festival (2001)

Airplane Crazy (2002) The Wichita National Film Festival (2002), The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (2002), The KAN Film Festival (2002)

Opening images on old reels of film taken from the house depict a Hungarian couple, recording one another while taking turns sitting on a park bench.

It’s Europe, only just post-World War II: Buildings captured in grainy black and white lay in ruins. Cars still boast chrome. Every adult wears a hat.

The happy couple:

HE films HER.

She is dressed to the nines in post WWII, Hungarian panache.

She opens her purse. She applies powder and lipstick.

She mugs for the camera.

He passes the camera.

SHE films HIM.

He is wearing a too-big overcoat cinched with a too-small belt. He wears a fedora.

He opens the purse. He applies the powder. He applies the lipstick.

He smiles and stalks off.

He is, seemingly, something more than sinister. (Nagging notion: Why does he insist on lugging his leather briefcase around the waterpark?)

She is playful and probably hot by the standards of the time.

Both are eventually revealed as probable alcoholics.

Both age poorly.

Both purportedly die painfully.

Meet the Locseis.

In time, they procreate.

They film their offsprings.

The usual family moments: Give the kids a bath.

But the camera lingers too long on son Erno’s crotch.

Hug the kids.

But the young ones never really smile, smothered in their parents’ arms.

Jump cut: Erno’s maybe age five, maybe age six. Mom is holding his penis while he relieves himself. Sister Etuska looks sternly on, a white bow in her hair. Cut to “Expert witness,” Dr. Roy Menninger, wincing at the footage and growing increasingly distressed.

Welcome to filmmaker Benjamin Meade’s Vakvagany (Dead End), eighty-plus minutes of mind-bending cinema.

Meade became enthralled with the vintage home movies and their sinister subject matter: Father Locsei’s not-so-clear role in “helping” the European Jews, circa Nazi Germany. What exactly does Daddy Locsei do for a living? Is he the Hungarian equivalent of Raoul Wallenberg?

Is he a communist?

Is he a friend of the Jews, or a closet Nazi?

Who knows?

Director Benjamin Meade doesn’t say.

Is Mommy Locsei abusing her son, while little sister Etuska looks on?

Meade lets the viewer decide, while three spirit guides offer their take on lurid life with the Locseis: novelist James Ellroy, psychiatrist Dr. Roy Menninger and filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

The Locsei home movies are riveting.

Underscored with moody, haunting compositions by The Alloy Orchestra, Vakvagany veers between the vintage home movies, the video commentary by the expert witnesses, and video and film depictions of the sad relics that are the Locsei children, circa the third millennium.

Son Erno is a hulking, dipsomaniacal giant clad in dirty brown shorts, an employer manufactured T-shirt and black, horn-rimmed glasses. Dense, good-natured and oedipally-inflected, his every statement assumes an almost savant-like resonance.

Director Meade echoes father Locsei’s cinematic technique by positioning the camera between Erno’s knees and, in one squirm-inducing scene, filming the drunken ex-baby urinating, this time all by himself.

Sister Etuska, circa 2001, is a well-educated hermit living in a cat-filled hovel...a damaged woman who, after being ambushed by the film crew and buzzed-brother Erno, hides under her shirt and accuses her late-father of a zeal for feline torture.

The film can be purchased HERE.

While a sometimes disturbing view, Vakvagany is highly recommended.

Ellroy fans, particularly, will also revel in the included extra footage of the author expressing his general disconnectedness from current popular culture, and lecturing his (“cross-species heterosexual”) English Bull Terrier ‘Dudley,’ who is seen nosing around the filmmaker’s equipment: “Dud, come see Daddy...come here, you hump!”