Replete with gypsy ebullience, criminal intrigue, furtive carnality and magical realism, Bibliotheque Pascal (Hungary 2010) is a superb choice to open the European Union Film Festival at the Siskel Film Center. Szabolcs Hajdu’s film chronicles the travels and travails of the resourceful Mona (Orsolya Török-Illyés), a musician, puppeteer and recent mother who is pulled into a seemingly hopeless future, only to emerge anew thanks to her own stubborn integrity and some surprising assistance from a past she thought she’d lost.
Travelling with a rowdy band of artists and performers through Eastern Europe, Mona meets, and is then held hostage by, the cagey Viorel (Andi Vasluianu), a fugitive smalltime criminal with the otherworldly ability to project his dreams into the quotidian world. Attempting to escape after he’s nodded off, Mona witnesses his sleeping fantasia of their future love and fate, and, rapt, chooses to spend the night with him.
In joining her later, we discover the departed Viorel has given her a daughter. She and Mona resume touring with her puppet show, when one night she happens across her father, a veteran criminal and swindler. Ostensibly accompanying him to Germany to assist him with some medical issues, Mona falls into the clutches of white slavers, and eventually ends up in the employ of Pascal (Shamgar Amram) at the eponymous Bibliotheque Pascal, an exclusive Liverpool brothel that casts its employees as characters from literature – Joan of Arc, Desdemona, Lolita, Dorian Gray, Don Juan.
Director Szabolcs Hajdu (Tamara, White Palms) is in his late thirties, but shoots and assembles his visual narrative like a vastly experienced elder statesman. His (and cinematographer András Nagy’s) camera can be very animated, but always conducts the eye with storytelling efficiency. One subtle but thrilling shot has the camera moving past Mona, only to have her quickly catch up to the moving frame – the camera insistently pulls her along in profile as she walks. His special effects are lovely and engaging, but never distract, and always serve the story. And his crowd scenes are artfully composed and executed, in or out, day or night, rain or shine.
Hajdu’s actors are asked to survey a wide variety of character types, proximities and languages (the global mix of Romany, Hungarian, English, Spanish and German is appropriately reflective of the cultural mix of most of Europe today), and they all deliver confidently. Török-Illyés, Amram, and Oana Pellea (as the fortune-telling aunt taking care of Mona’s daughter in her absence) are especially good. The tone of the film modulates between carny roadshow, rainy-night policier, and bleak bedroom intrigue, but Hajdu maintains a firm but benevolent stylistic hand on the efforts of his cast.
'Bibliotheque Pascal' is a fun and colorful Candide-like moral fable. But it’s infused with real darkness, with a lot to say about the forces of global criminal commerce, the ineffectiveness of well-intentioned bureaucracies to keep it at bay, and our own individual capacities for using love and imagination to succeed where institutions fail.
‘Bibliotheque Pascal’ is the opening night feature for the annual European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday, March 4th at 6:00 P.M. Director Szabolcs Hajdu and actress Orsolya Török-Illyés will be present. It also screens on Monday, March 7th at 8:15 P.M.
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