01/07/2024 - Iveta Grófová takes us to wartime Bratislava in a solid period drama based on Peter Krištúfek’s novella Ema and the Death’s Head

Bratislava, 1942. “The whole world is upside down,” says one officer to another, and that line suffices to set the scene for Iveta Grófová’s third feature, The Hungarian Dressmaker [+see also:
trailer
interview: Iveta Grófová
film profile], premiering in the Karlovy Vary IFF’s Crystal Globe Competition. The period film is based on a novella (Ema and the Death’s Head) and a script by author Peter Krištúfek, who tragically passed away shortly before production began. Alongside him, Grófová, whose sophomore project, Little Harbour [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iveta Grófová
film profile], won the Crystal Bear at the 2017 Berlinale (in Generation Kplus), is also credited for working on the script, as well as directing.

Her new film centres on Marika (Alexandra Borbély, from On Body and Soul [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ildiko Enyedi
interview: Ildiko Enyedi
interview: Réka Tenki
film profile]), the Hungarian widow of a Slovak soldier, who loses her job as the town’s dressmaker salon is closing due to the deportations. Her life appears to be in (a rather quiet) limbo, until she discovers a young Jewish boy named Šimon (Nico Klimek) hiding in her barn.

The Slovak director’s 2012 debut, Made in Ash [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iveta Grófóva
interview: Jiří Konečný
film profile], explored the intersection of languages and their geopolitical significance in Central Europe 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it’s not at all surprising that she’s kept her penchant for subtle representation of differences and similarities alike, through linguistic means. In The Hungarian Dressmaker, it is the switch between the Slovak and Hungarian languages that charts the social tensions as opposing and criss-crossing. Whether in church, at home or in public, resorting to one language or the other means either allegiance or defiance: it’s clear that belonging no longer means the same thing it used to.

Hitler’s invasion broke up the independent Czechoslovakia, the film’s epigraph tells us, introducing the wartime Slovak state as a place of strain and political ambivalence. At that point, more than two-thirds of the state’s Jewish population was being deported to German-occupied Poland, and the film gives us a sense of this through the mounting feeling of unease, as well as the whispers of closures and disappearances on a daily basis. Within this broader context, the presence of Šimon and Marika’s (reluctant) decision to shelter him become the film’s emotional crux as the young boy tries to comprehend the meaning of war and life in wartime – as does Marika.

The Hungarian Dressmaker is honest enough with its protagonist to show her in both strength and weakness: a subplot couples her with a Slovak Nazi officer, and their push and pull often ends in violent eruptions, perhaps as a symbol of a European identity that seems impossible to negotiate. Borbély’s effervescence shines through in moments of passion and hatred – which are few and far between – but her strong, grounded presence gives the film the gravity it needs to tell its meandering story of loss and survival. As a counterpoint to the gravity of all of these serious, period performances, cinematographer Martin Štrba orchestrates a frantic, boxed-in visual style, making the use of rack focus its most defining feature. The world is not only upside down, but also blurry and slipping out of grasp: a perfectly suitable way to imagine how World War II must have felt for a lonely dressmaker and an abandoned child in wartime Slovakia.

The Hungarian Dressmaker was produced by Slovak company PubRes, in co-production with the Czech Republic’s Total HelpArt THA and Hungary’s Campfilm. It is sold overseas by Reason8.