The Hungarian Dressmaker

Ema a smrtihlav

The Hungarian Dressmaker (2024)
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

VERDICT: A Hungarian dressmaker does what she can to survive and resist the power abuses of the ‘40s Slovak State fascist militia in Iveta Grofova’s dark, evocative drama.

Slovak director Iveta Grofova powerfully portrays the menacing and insecure nature of wartime life for ethnic minorities, and their resistance, in the 1940s Slovak State, a clerico-fascist puppet state formed after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, in her third feature The Hungarian Dressmaker. Based on the novel Emma and the Death’s Head, published a decade ago by Peter Kristufek (who collaborated on the screenplay), it screened in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. As a new contribution to a vast body of historical dramas that deal with the Holocaust and the politics of hatred that gave rise to it (a genre that is now resurgent, as its reminders of wartime horrors have not prevented a return of the far right to prominence in today’s Europe), The Hungarian Dressmaker and its narrative of threatened identity and subterfuge is on one level framed fairly conventionally. But triumphal heroism is absent as, with moody intensity, symbolic touches of dark poetry and a laudable sensitivity to the particular vulnerabilities of solitary women in an era in which brute power abuses were rife, it shows that allegiance was not always a choice, and that the mind escapes where it can to survive.

Alexandra Borbely, who starred in Ildiko Enyedi’s 2017 Berlinale Golden Bear winner On Body and Soul, is compelling as Marika, a young Hungarian widow who is as emotionally fine-tuned to all the heightened cues and suffering around her as she is unable to numb out the nonsensical demands of a world cruelly derailed by authoritarianism. Her husband, Lajos, died after being deported to the USSR, and now, in 1942, Marika is careful to stick to the German language in public in Bratislava, as hostility to Jewish and Hungarian minorities is being weaponised by a brutal fascist regime that has taken power. Language as a marker of identity and tool of dominance is foregrounded in a film that carefully works in the significance of shifts between German, Slovak and Hungarian — especially when Marika, after losing her job in an Aryanised dressmaking shop, moves to a village on the Slovak-Hungarian border, where the Hlinka Guard, the fascist party’s militia, are demanding a controversial change in the Catholic church from a Hungarian-language mass to one in Slovak, preaching ethnic “national unity.”

Marika would prefer to keep to herself in the village, where neighbours do not mind their malicious gossip being overheard, especially as she is clandestinely harbouring a young Jewish boy, Simon (Nico Klimek), in her barn. But, amid the terror of house searches, the confiscation of possessions on flimsy pretexts, and the rounding up of Jews for deportation, Nazi officer and Hlinka Guard supervisor Herr Lippke (Alexander E. Fennon) asks Marika to use her dressmaking skills to modify a dress for his wife for a ball, giving it some “Berlin flair.” He has more than a strictly professional connection in mind, and cares little for her consent. As a woman living alone, on land that remains hers from her marriage, she is also the target of unwanted attention from a Slovak captain, Dusan (Milan Ondrik), whose lesser rank does not diminish his prioprietary attitude, even as neighbours condemn her as a “filthy collaborator.”

Simon is not the only Jewish orphan on the run, and the fate of similarly persecuted children, heard from his hiding place, is a perpetual reminder that he must stick to his half-existence of solitude among pigs and goats, frostbite blackening his toes. Outside, Slovak youths are trained by Dusan as the “future defenders” of a militaristic state. Evocatively shot by D.O.P. Martin Strba in the deep, inky blues of nighttime secrets and sombre longings, the film shifts into hallucinatory segments as Simon’s mind wanders. The traumatic unreality of the era creeps into our field of vision, through imagery such as a hatching death’s head hawkmoth caterpillar, that seems a harbinger of danger more than of new life, just like the Hlinka Guard uniform emblem.

Director: Iveta Grofova
Screenwriters: Peter Kristufek, Iveta Grofova
Cast: Alexandra Borbely, Nico Klimek, Milan Ondrik, Alexander E. Fennon
Producers: Zuzana Mistrikova, Ondrej Trojan
Cinematographer: Martin Strba
Editing: Martin Malo
Music: Matej Hlavac
Sound: Matej Hlavac, Tobias Potocny
Production companies: PubRes (Slovakia), Total HelpArt T.H.A. (Czech Republic), Campfilm (Hungary)
Sales: REASON8 Films
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
In German, Slovak, Hungarian
129 minutes

Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.