June 21, 1996

Magic Hunter

It wouldn't be inaccurate to describe "Magic Hunter," Ildiko Enyedi's hopelessly pretentious meditation on the Weber opera "Der Freischutz," as a movie that dreams of saving the human race. Or as the Hungarian director nervily asserts in the film's production notes, "We people living today have done all we can to put ourselves in mortal danger and only a miracle can save us."

The solution, she proposes, is to reconnect to the folkloric past, when the Devil and the Virgin Mary manifested themselves all over the place, and wait for salvation.

The film cuts back and forth from present-day Hungary to medieval times, when Christianity was replacing goddess worship, to create an allegorical puzzle, whose pieces fit together only at the very end.

Far more complex and abstruse than Ms. Enyedi's 1990 film, "My 20th Century," "Magic Hunter" is an unwieldy stylistic hybrid of narrative film making and arty montage. Because its contemporary characters are empty symbolic figures, the film's surreal moments have more impact than its convoluted story.

Periodically, the film stops in its tracks to contemplate images of nature. Tibor Mathe's luminous close-up pictures of a falling acorn and of a snail proceeding slowly across a wooden bridge have a visionary flair.

In the film's most striking scene, a rabbit fleeing a pack of dogs takes refuge under the skirt of the Virgin Mary, who has appeared in a forest. At the very last second, the Virgin and the rabbit metamorphose into a painting that medieval worshipers have brought into the woods.

These images are crudely inserted into a story that begins with a mother telling her young daughter the tale of a marksman who sells his soul to the Devil for a handful of magic bullets. There is one condition: the Devil may determine the path of the final bullet.

From here, "Magic Hunter" focuses on the storyteller's husband, Max (Gary Kemp), a police marksman in present-day Budapest. Peering through his telescopic sights at a desperado holding a young woman hostage, he pulls his trigger at the wrong moment, striking the woman instead of her captor. Horrified at his mistake, he is reassured when Kaspar (Peter Vallai), a Mephistophelean senior officer on the police force, gives him some magic bullets, which he squanders in target practice until only one remains.

Max's next assignment is to protect a visiting Russian chess master (Alexander Kaidanovsky), who is in danger of assassination. By sheer coincidence, Max's wife (Sadie Frost) and daughter (Alexandra Wasscher) strike up an acquiantance with the Russian while frolicking in a park, and Max finds himself observing a developing friendship that he fears might evolve into an adulterous affair.

In contemplating the elements of chance and fate in human life, "Magic Hunter" examines some of the same themes that preoccupied the Polish film maker Krzysztof Kieslowski, who died three months ago. But "Magic Hunter" is klutzy and vague in its symbolic connections, and because its characters never come to life, the film has no moral force. It is a rambling cinematic essay pretending to be a movie.


This film is not rated.

Cast: Gary Kemp (Max), Sadie Frost (Eva), Alexander Kaidanovsky (Maxim), Peter Vallai (Kaspar) and Alexandra Wasscher (Lili).

Directed by Ildiko Enyedi; written (in Hungarian, with English subtitles) by Ms. Enyedi and Laszlo Laszlo Revesz; director of photography, Tibor Mathe; edited by Maria Rigo; production designer, Attila Ferenczfy-Kovacs; produced by Andras Hamori and Wieland Schulz-Keil; released by Shadow Distribution. Running time: 106 minutes.

Showtimes and tickets from 777-FILM Online



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