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6.5/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 6.5/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Ítél a Balaton remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have seventy minutes to spare and want to see some incredibly wet Hungarian drama from 1933, Ítél a Balaton is absolutely worth your time.
You will love it if you dig gorgeous, old-school melodrama where nature does most of the talking, but if you need crisp dialogue and fast plots, you will probably turn this off in ten minutes. 🌊
The setup is basically Romeo and Juliet, but with a lot more fish.
Two families are fighting over who gets to fish in which part of Lake Balaton, which seems like a very stressful way to live. Then the young couple gets caught, and the girl gets put on a boat during a massive storm because apparently, the lake is the ultimate judge.
I kept thinking about how cold that water must have been during filming.
The director, Pál Fejős, has this crazy obsession with water reflections. Half the shots are just beautiful, glittering waves, which is cool until you realize they did not have modern waterproof cameras back then.
It has that same raw, slightly dangerous outdoor energy you get in early silent epics like The Covered Wagon, but squished into a tiny fishing village.
There is this one actor, Antal Páger, who has these incredibly intense eyes. Every time he looks at the water, he looks like he wants to fight it.
The sound design is pretty rough, though.
It has that early-sound-era echo where every footstep sounds like someone dropping a wooden plank onto a concrete floor. And some of the screaming gets so high-pitched it made my dog tilt his head.
But man, that storm climax is something else.
You can actually feel the panic when the little wooden boat starts spinning around. It does not look like special effects; it looks like they just threw a poor actress into a real storm and hoped for the best.
They definitely do not make them like this anymore, mostly because of modern safety laws.
Anyway, the ending wraps up way too fast, like they suddenly ran out of film. But those shots of the grey, moody lake will probably stick in my head for a few days.