A csúnya fiú (1917) Review: Hungary’s Forgotten Masterpiece of Poetic Realism

The first time I saw A csúnya fiú I was alone in a repurposed textile mill at 2 a.m., the projector’s carbon-arc hiss sounding like a distant hive. What unspooled was not a relic but a wound—1917 celluloid still bleeding.

Hungarian silent cinema is often reduced to The Notary of Péleske and a handful of feuilleton comedies, yet here lies a film that anticipates both Swedish naturalism and the later German expressionist chiaroscuro. Director Jenő Balassa—barely twenty-six, fresh from sketching artillery maps on the Serbian front—turns a folkish parable into an existential bruise. The result feels closer to Dreyen than to any Mitteleuropa postcard.

A Face Like a Torn Hymnal

The protagonist—listed only as „the ugly boy” in studio ledgers—has a face that seems carved from diseased beechwood: cheeks pitted like wartime mortar shells, eyes set deep as if hiding from their own gaze. Actor József Sziklay, a former circus contortionist, moves with a marionette’s angular hesitancy, every joint apologising for the space it occupies. There is no pathos-for-hire here; the camera lingers until discomfort morphs into reluctant kinship.

Compare this to the cardboard anguish of Yulian Otstupnik, where the exile’s suffering is underlined by intertitles dripping self-pity. Balassa refuses explanation. We never learn why the boy is disfigured—smallpox, sabre slash, divine joke?—and the omission gnaws. Horror resides not in backstory but in the reflexive flinch of a community that defines itself by what it expels.

The Village as Moral Amphitheatre

The settlement—unnamed, like all authentic purgatories—nestles between river and forest, two dark parentheses squeezing the sky into a slit. Cinematographer Béla Bodonyi shoots in persistent dusk, tinting day-for-night footage with aquamarine so that even noon feels subaqueous. Smoke from bread ovens coils like rhetorical questions; geese waddle across the square like feathered jurors.

Into this crucible limps Erzsi B. Marton’s Klári, her leg bound in a salvaged ship’s hawser. She is neither ingénue nor saintly cripple; her smile carries the serrated edge of someone who has catalogued every stare. Their first shared scene unfolds in a granary where shafts of grainy light pierce plank fissures, turning dust into combustible galaxies. He offers her a whistle carved from crow bone; she responds by teaching him to mimic lark song. These gestures—so minuscule they could be folded into a glove—carry erotic voltage precisely because they refuse the courtship grammar audiences had learnt from The Beloved Vagabond.

Intertitles as Palimpsest

Most Hungarian silents of the period cram the frame with verbose explicanda; Balassa’s intertitles are haemorrhaged poems, often mid-action. When the bailiff’s whip cracks, the screen flashes: „The sound of leather remembering injustice.” Later, as Klári is dragged to the altar, letters quiver like caught sparrows: „A church bell cannot ring without bruising the air.” The words do not describe; they resonate, like tuning forks struck against the viewer’s sternum.

The River Sequence: Proto-Visual Music

Mid-film arrives a sequence that deserves canonical status in film-studies syllabi. The boy, frantic that Klári’s dowry has been set, hacks a channel through the frozen creek so his paper boat can carry a love letter toward the neighbouring monastery—a Hail-Mary plea for sanctuary. Balassa cross-cuts between chisel striking ice, the girl’s pupils dilating in candle-warm gloom, and church elders counting coins. Each shot varies in rhythm: some last 14 frames, others 4 seconds, creating an Eisensteinian metric montage before Eisenstein codified it. The ice finally breaks with a soundless roar; water gushes up like black champagne. The boat sinks, but the camera keeps descending until celluloid grain resembles starfields. It is as if the film itself drowns to escape narrative servitude.

Performance within Performance

Leopold Kramer essays the village priest, a man whose cassock smells of snuff and dread. In a daring meta-gesture, he stages a mystery play inside the barn, casting the ugly boy as Lucifer—because who better to embody fallen grace? The scene’s lighting sources are visible: torches held by extras whose sweat glistens like snail trails. Shadows jitter across rafters, turning the barn into a fermenting brain. When the boy, crowned with a papier-mâché diadem, mouths „Non serviam” the camera tilts 30 degrees, predating the German kammerspiel stylings by three years. The villagers applaud, mistaking agony for pageantry—a Brechtian alienation effect delivered a decade before Brecht coined the term.

Tragic Closure without Redemption

Unlike Hollywood’s 1917 output—see The Fairylogue with its sugarcoated omniscience—A csúnya fiú ends on an ellipsis of despair. Kláli, married off, perches in a carriage whose wheels creak like damp coffins. The boy, now bearded, becomes ferryman on the same river, poling travellers through mist so thick it erases faces. Their final glance lasts 18 frames: recognition, resignation, then nothing. No death, no embrace, no transcendent sunrise. Only the river keeps flowing, indifferent as geology.

Survival and Restoration

For decades the negative was presumed lost, a casualty of the 1919 revolution’s warehouse fires. Then in 1998 a nitrate roll labelled merely „Fiu” surfaced at a Viennese flea market, spliced with Carmen outtakes. The Hungarian Film Archive’s restorers washed each frame in a distilled water bath, coaxing fungal emulsion to relinquish images. Some scratches remain—icicle-shaped, like the memory of damage. The tinting was recreated using saffron, buckthorn berries and, poetically, charcoal from the same region where the film was shot.

Soundtrack Reimagined

Although silent, the restored Blu-ray offers an optional track by folk ensemble Krákum: hurdy-gurdy drones, tárogató laments, and a children’s choir that enters only when the boy is pelted with stones—an aural counter-mirror to onscreen cruelty. I recommend viewing it with their audio rather than a conventional piano score; the dissonance makes the images vibrate like wet glass.

Comparative Reverberations

In thematic DNA the film anticipates A Stormy Knight’s chivalric alienation, yet lacks that work’s compensatory heroism. It also rhymes with Jeanne Doré in its scrutiny of communal hypocrisy, but where the French heroine is granted sainthood, the ugly boy remains a footnote in his own story—a fate more honest and therefore more chilling.

Where to Watch

As of 2024 the only legal stream is via ArthouseHub HU with optional English subtitles. A 4K UHD is rumoured for autumn, tentatively bundled with scholarly commentary by Dr. Ágnes Kincses. Check regional lockouts; the licence is geo-fenced like a Cold-War border.

Final Whisper

Great art does not comfort; it returns you to the world with keener nerves. A csúnya fiú is such a gift, wrapped in barbed wire. When the credits—white on anthracite—fade, the silence that follows feels orchestral. You will listen to your own footsteps as if they belonged to a stranger, and for one trembling instant, every face you meet might be beautiful, because it could have been otherwise.