The first time I watched A napraforgós hölgy I emerged staggering, as if I’d swallowed a spoonful of hot copper. The second time I kept my eyes half-lidded, letting the sunflowers blur into a molten lattice, and finally understood: this film isn’t about finding a missing soldier; it’s about the vertigo of being devoured by your own iconography.
The Woman Who Paints Herself Aflame
Erzsi B. Marton has the cheekbones of a Modigliani saint and the predatory patience of a housecat. She moves through Siklósi’s script like ink through parchment, widening her eyes only when the lens least expects it. Watch her hands: they hover a fraction of a second before touching canvas, the same way believers hesitate at the communion rail. That tremor is the hinge on which the entire narrative swings—her refusal to finish a portrait equates to a refusal to be finished off.
In the carnival sequence she trades her smock for a harlequin coat threaded with sunflower filaments; when the strongman flexes, golden fibers snap against his skin, sketching temporary scars. It’s a throwaway gag that metastasizes into prophecy: everyone who brushes against her art will wear its wound.
Trieste as Palimpsest
Vojnović’s intertitles never name the city, yet the limestone haze, the rotting Habsburg facades, the salt-stung operettas leaking from tavern doors—this is unmistakably Trieste, psychologic borderland where Italy grazes Slavic gloom. Cinematographer Jenö Törzs (also playing a morphine-sipping vaudevillian) shoots alleyways like vertical cemeteries, tilting the camera until gutters resemble open graves. Grain silos become cathedrals; their wooden ribs echo the flying buttresses of a skull. Every frame is double-exposed with the residue of empires that expired before the reel began.
Military Death, Civilian Afterlife
Anton Tiller appears first as a passport photo—eyes scorched out with a cigarette—then as a mirage in cracked opera glasses, finally as flesh riddled with self-loathing. The film’s central conundrum is bureaucratic: if the state pronounces you dead, does resurrection make you a ghost or a forger? Compare this to Escaped from Siberia, where exile is geographical; here exile is ontological. The officer can’t cross the Piazza without soldiers saluting a corpse; he responds by painting his uniform civilian-blue with house-slaked lime, a DIY witness-protection that peels like sunburn.
The Feminine Gaze, Weaponized
Unlike The Price She Paid or Le calvaire de Mignon, which punish women for desiring, Sunflower Woman lets its heroine weaponize scopophilia. She turns every leer into a commission fee: the more they want to own her image, the richer her palette grows. There’s a devilish scene inside the maritime archive where Balassa’s bureaucrat offers her a sack of rationed cadmium yellow—worth more than gold—in exchange for a nude study. She accepts, then paints him as a minotaur knee-deep in sunflower stalks, his horns fashioned from naval protractors. When government censors confiscate the canvas, they unwittingly hang their own monstrous portrait in the customs house foyer.
Carnival of Disintegrating Identities
Mid-film, the narrative fractures into a masquerade that makes The Fibbers look like a church picnic. Claire Lotto’s violinist is forced to perform Bartók on a sawed-off viola while masked revelers bet on which string will snap first. Each broken strand is matched by a quick-cut to a military telegram—one more soldier deleted from the land of the living. The editing anticipates Eisenstein by at least five years, yet it’s looser, drunk on carnival temporality: smash a bottle, and the shards reassemble into a portrait before hitting the floor.
Sunflower as Semaphore
Botanists will note that helianthus turns its head to track the sun; mystics will counter that it also lowers that head when overcast. The film exploits both habits. When Marton stalks the wharves at dawn, sunflowers bob like periscopes scanning for hope; by dusk they droop, exhausted by the weight of surveillance. One indelible insert shows a bee crawling out of the flower’s Fibonacci heart, coated in pollen the color of dried blood—nature’s miniature of our heroine emerging from state bureaucracy dusted in yellow evidence.
Male Anxiety, Abridged
Iván Petrovich’s anarchist printer owns a press hidden beneath a disused baptistery. His manifestos denounce “the tyranny of framed rectangles,” yet he covets the painter’s smallest canvas, pinning it above his cot like a secular crucifix. During the climactic fire, he risks asphyxiation to rescue that scrap of cloth, only to discover the image has already migrated: the real portrait is the scorch-mark branded across the loft beams—a woman mid-scream, flowers sprouting from her mouth like flaming tongues. Masculine possession literally goes up in smoke, leaving the man clutching a square of empty air.
Sound of Silence, Taste of Sepia
There is no surviving score, so festival programmers usually pair it with something Hungarian and discordant. Big mistake. Project it silent, and the absence becomes an acoustic mirror: you hear seat-creaks, distant gulls, the soft pop of your own pupils dilating. The lack of authoritative soundtrack lets viewers hallucinate their own Triestine soundscape—my screening smelled faintly of coffee rust and Adriatic brine, or so I swore.
Comparative Corpus
If you crave another tale where maps fail and lovers dissolve, try Rainha Depois de Morta Inês de Castro—its queen is posthumously crowned, echoing Tiller’s posthumous resurrection. Or sample Les heures – Épisode 4 for similar temporal slippage, though it lacks the visceral pigment that makes Sunflower Woman feel hand-tinted by Hephaestus himself. On the American front, Ruggles of Red Gap toys with identity swapping, but swaps it for frontier laughs rather than ontological dread.
Performances, Ranked by Combustibility
- Erzsi B. Marton — incandescent; she paints with her retinas.
- Anton Tiller — walks as if every step might crack the world’s veneer.
- Lajos Kemenes — gruff, sea-salt authenticity; his grin could sand barnacles.
- Lucy Doraine — flirts with camp yet lands in tragedy, like a chandelier crashing onto a funeral.
- Jenö Balassa — bureaucratic smarm so precise you can smell the archival mildew.
Color as Political Agent
Conservative governments fear red, but this film warns against yellow. Cadmium pigment, prized for its opacity, arrives courtesy of military convoys—every tube squeezed is complicity in colonial plunder. When Marton refuses to dilute her pigment with linseed, she’s not merely courting texture; she’s hoarding munitions. The final conflagration thus performs double duty: it annihilates evidence and redistributes contraband pigment into the Trieste sky, turning sunset itself into a purloined canvas.
Lost and Found and Maybe Lost Again
The nitrate negative vanished sometime around 1923, resurfaced in a Zagreb basement in 1987 with the final reel fused like burnt toffee. Restorationists salvaged 87% of the runtime; the remaining 2½ minutes exist only in a censored French synopsis that speaks of a “bébé de pétrole” — baby of petroleum — a phrase no one can decode. Perhaps it’s better that way. The lacuna invites us to doodle our own ending in the ash, ensuring the film never calcifies into certainty.
Verdict
A napraforgós hölgy is a vertiginous fever of flaming petals, bureaucratic ectoplasm and pigment as contraband. It shames most contemporary explorations of identity by proving that selfhood is not a stable passport but a canvas that insists on being set alight.
Seek it out whenever an archivist dares to project the unrestored print—scratches, chemical blisters, and all. Bring no preconceptions; leave, perhaps, with a sunflower seed lodged behind your eyelid, germinating every time you blink.
