Jupiters Moon
www.telegraph.co.uk
Take the classic Chuck Jones cartoon about the frog who sings ragtime, cross it with Richard Donners first Superman film, dump the results in the middle of the Syrian refugee crisis, and light the fuse. Congratulations: you may have just reenacted the game of four-dimensional cognitive hopscotch that led to Kornl Mundruczs new film.
This politically charged superhero parable is less a case of the Hungarian director pulling out all the stops than hooking up the pipe organ in his village church to a nuclear reactor: it is an outrageously ambitious and intermittently staggering piece of work, though it completely lacks the kind of discipline or focus that might have made its themes or images really stick.
It opens on the fringe of present-day Europe, where hundreds of displaced Syrian souls are crammed into lorries that are jerking and rumbling towards the Hungarian border. One of the passengers is Aryan (Zsombor Jger), who makes a floundering scramble for freedom across a yawning river, but is shot through the heart by a Liam Neeson-like border enforcer (Gyrgy Cserhalmi) who tails him through the trees on the far side.
Aryan drops to the ground then suddenly, his body is borne aloft by unseen forces, and starts revolving madly in the air. Far from dead, he has become super-human or perhaps divinely turbo-charged.
A corrupt doctor called Stern (Merab Ninidze), who works at the refugee camps in a kind of unofficial penance for a tragic past misdeed, smells opportunity, and smuggles Aryan into Budapest, where he touts him as an angel to superstitious patients who are prepared to pay big money for a close encounter with the miraculous.
As Aryan dutifully levitates, his arms stretched wide in benediction, Sterns clients crane their necks in wonder, and Mundruczs camera follows suit, making their bathhouses and penthouses twist as crazily as Christopher Nolans spinning hotel corridor in Inception. (The budget was a snug 4 million, which means the special effects defy belief twice over.) All Aryan wants is to be reunited with his father, whom he lost in the panic on the border, but his balding Svengali has other plans at least while business is good.
From the involved and blatant central Christian allegory to the titles more diffuse cosmic resonance the moon in question is the ice-encrusted Europa, which the films prologue suggests could be a cradle of new life forms there is an entire marching band of metaphors parping and honking away here, and the racket soon becomes unbearable.
Reconcile yourself to the fact that the thematic loose ends are never going to be sensibly tied up, though, and its possible to coast through the entire film on its unflagging visual bravado alone.
A climactic, single-take car chase shot at bumper height wouldnt be out of place in one of the better Bourne films its fair to say the Citron XM has probably never looked cooler while a dreamy interlude in which Aryans shadow slips down the side of a tower block past floor after floor of its sweetly oblivious residents feels like a great music video waiting for the perfect partner track.
If your first instinct is to wonder who on earth comes up with this stuff, the answer is Kata Wber, who also wrote Mundruczs White God, a 2014 parable of underclass revolt that was basically Spartacus with stray dogs. That earlier film didnt mince its allegories either, but it had a sinewy sense of purpose thats frustratingly absent here, while Aryans feet twirl dazzlingly and weightlessly far above the ground.
