Budapest 1913

Irisz Leiter, an elegant young lady in a hat, arrives in the Hungarian city from Trieste, Italy.

She seeks work as a milliner in the Leiter store, former property of her parents who died in a fire. The prestigious name is all that is left of the family, although Irisz soon learns from enigmatic messengers that she has an unknown brother and undertakes an interminable search for him.

The new owner, the ambiguous Oszkar Brill, along with his wife, do not want to hire her,but she, despite her hostility manages to convince them to let her work for them.

From here will begin an unstoppable, enthralling, mysterious chain of events that will trap the young woman in a vortex of equivocal and incomprehensible happenings.

And as a group of rebels of unknown origin exerts terror in the city, her brother Kalman takes on the guise of a shadowy figure, a presence that looms and simultaneously disappears just as his sister seems to meet him.

The prestigious, historic Leiter store now seems to be the cover for treacherous, ambiguous secrets hiding a colossal hoax.

Irisz lives and chases a hallucinated and surreal, dangerous and indecipherable reality; a kind of virtual representation of what is about to happen: the political and social disintegration of the Autro-Hungarian Empire.

The delirium of Irisz, who does not know where to go and cannot comprehend how to get out of the labyrinth in which he finds himself, seems to represent the inevitability of a fate prophetically sensed but unknowingly experienced.

Nineteenth-century international relations stipulated that alliances were usually secret ( the detailed terms of treaties were not in the public domain) and bargained bilaterally, sometimes with the addition of a third power; despite the existing spy networks, it was difficult for any chancery to get the exact picture.

The Leiter atelier, is the setting for the theater of these relations, and the situation Irisz experiences seems to portend the transformation of a marginal and local event into the fuse of a general conflict.

Austria had only been made great during the Habsburg period, that is, during that historical time span between the mid-16th century and the first half of the 19th century. The motto of the dynasty was :" Austriae est imperare orbi universo," and if it was up to Austria to reign over the world, Lazslo Nemes anticipates the script will have as its soundtrack the requiem of Finis Austriae.

A country that had lost political ambitions by focusing on the artistic supremacy of European cultural movements and currents. From there had passed the immortal seven stars of music-Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss. At court, in the ranks of the aristocracy and among the people German blood was joined by Slavic, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, French and Flemish blood.

Austria had succeeded in harmoniously blending these contrasts into a new and peculiar reality, that of the Austrian spirit, of "Viennese-ness."

As historian Giuseppe Baiocchi recounts, it was a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional and multi-cultural empire the Austro-Hungarian one ruled with great wisdom, and Vienna was a city that united and mitigated disparate backgrounds and cultures by offering its citizens a cosmopolitan and international education.

This allows understanding of the obsessive, pressing, claustrophobic pace played excellently by Nemes' Irisz/Vienna, which paces without understanding: the end toward which it is about to incur.

The race toward the death of an age in its twilight that writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal from Rodaun notes thus in 1912 "our old Austria is besieged by black shadows and murky omens...inside half indolence and half unconsciousness, and problems now too tangled, too many Gordian knots. We move toward a time of darkness. Everyone, within himself, feels it. We can lose everything at any moment. And what is more serious, even winning in reality, we conquer nothing but problems and perplexity."

Nemes could not better portray these feelings through this masterpiece on Finis Austriae, and he does so using the iconography of Klimt's and Egon Schiele's somber hints of death, the artistic expressions of the Jugendstil, and the narrative capacity of Arthur Schnitzler's atmospheres.

One hundred forty-two minutes of tension, almost as exhausting as the vision of Son of Saul, a trap from which it proves impossible to want to break free. A stylistically conscious artistic aesthetic cage, frustrating and hypnotic, generous and demanding. No room is allowed for carelessness and disengaged entertainment.

A highly sophisticated work, with no interpretative concessions, in which the relationship of absolute complementarity of bios and thanatos is fused, conveyed by the melancholy of what is about to be lost and the anguish over the enigmatic inevitability of events: a narrative mutilation that does not hesitate to amputate any simplification in order to wedge the viewer into an otherwise indecipherable vision.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice