Taxidermia

Gyorgy Pálfi’s Hukkle was one of the successes of AFF03 and now he’s back with this astonishingly Rabelaisian tale, which confronts you with everything about human bodily functions that your polite upbringing has always wanted to deny. Pálfi converts three generations of Hungarian history into an exuberant story of bodies. Rural sex is celebrated as an exchange of messy bodily fluids in the barnyard; Hungary’s major spectator sport becomes speed-eating. One of our protagonists, Kalman, even has a new technique of vomiting named after him. It seems that what goes down, eventually comes up. And what goes around, comes around. After a career of stuffing himself, Kalman produces a son who stuffs animals. Thus does the new Europe acknowledge its relation with the old Europe of the Soviet era. Pálfi has found his excessively surrealist imagery in the stories of popular Hungarian author, Lajos Parti Nagy. A thoroughly enjoyable film guaranteed to have something to make everyone squirm.

A symphony of the grotesque, a raucous comedy which manages to cram an unimaginable number and range of bodily functions into its trim running time. Revolting, provocative, funny and base, Taxidermia is certainly not for the fainthearted (or weak stomached).

Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival