Long Twilight by Attila Janisch - movie screening

The elderly, but mentally and physically active archaeologist (Mari Törőcsik) takes part in a professional celebration among her students at the place of her childhood. A separate driver would take her home, but the woman stops the car to finish the journey on foot, cutting through a heather field. However, she gets lost on the way and is forced to get on a rickety bus that takes her for hours into the night towards the unknown. Later, she continues her journey in the car of two suspicious figures, then spends the night in a run-down pub, where she falls down the stairs and loses consciousness. She wakes up on the bus, where the seemingly real nightmare continues.

Attila Janisch built a distinctive and unmistakable author's universe from just three feature films. The trilogy Shadow on the Snow (Árnyék a havon, 1992), Long twilight (Hosszú alkony, 1997) and Másnap (2004) are located on the border between genre and authorship. All three are films of consciousness, but while Shadow on the Snow and Másnap, which uses the toolbox of thrillers and crime fiction, revolve around crime, Long twilight chooses a more lyrical theme - the passing away.

The main character, played by Mari Törőcsik, is not - or not only - lost in real space, but also in her own memories. What makes Long Twilight really exciting is that, like the old lady, the viewer does not perceive exactly when the transition from reality to the maze of nightmares takes place - this way a high degree of identification can be created, since the audience can also experience the same experience of being lost like the main character. The director guides her from reality to the surreal space by using only locations and motifs that seem ordinary. The languid landscapes, dirt roads shrouded in a cloud of dust, and run-down pubs are familiar despite their lack of character, yet in the woman's strange state of consciousness they seem alien.

In Janisch's film, hardly any dialogue is heard and when the characters speak, they don't talk about important things either. The director doesn't even say that we are seeing the last journey of the protagonist who has to deal with her past, somewhere on the border between life and death. Among other things, it is thanks to Mari Törőcsik's face, gestures, and disembodied presence that the silent ordeal of the archaeologist can be evaluated not only as a conscious film experiment, but also as a real, shocking human drama.

Janisch, like his 1982 college graduation film Zizi, adapted a Shirley Jackson short story. The first draft written by the director followed the original work exactly, but his permanent screenwriter, András Forgách, suggested an important change: he proposed that, unlike the novella, the main character should not be a sullen and cynical woman, but a woman who accepts and even lives happily her own old age - from this positive starting point, her fall is much more unexpected and dramatic. Likwise in Zizi, Forgách wrote the character specifically for Mari Törőcsik.

According to the director, a personal trauma also defined the film. His father was paralyzed and almost comatose before filming began. Janisch tried to imagine what it would be like to exist helplessly, in "expanded time", and he wanted to express this experience through the protagonist's perception of reality.

For Hosszú alkony, the director created a detailed storyboard, which he did not deviate from during filming. Writer András Forgách, cinematographer Gábor Medvigy and visual designer Attila F. Kovács took part in creating the film's world among his permanent co-creators.

Attila Janisch's trilogy has few domestic precedents, but at the same time it builds heavily on universal film history. It evokes Hitchcock's suspense technique, Bergman's psychological approach, Buñuel's surrealism and the chronological structure of the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais. If not to the same extent as Shadow on the Snow, but it is also related to the so-called black series, that is, to those films (Kárhozat, Szürkület, Woyzeck) in which the Hungarian landscape appears as an otherworldly space.

Hosszú alkony won the main prize and the director's award at the 1997 Hungarian Film Festival, the Don Quixote Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and the Best Actress Award at the Salerno Film Festival.

Source: National Film Archives