BOLS[H]E VITA (Ibolya Fekete, 1995)

Bolse vita—in the States, Bolshe vita—is an extremely disappointing film. Its numerous prizes are the result of the momentousness of its subject matter: the burst of freedom in Russia and Eastern Europe in 1989-90. “[T]he impossible became reality overnight,” the narrator tells us, “. . . when Hungary opened its borders” to an influx of Russians. We follow three of these young men, along with residents from elsewhere, as they try to find success in Budapest. Traveling companions Yura and Vadim are musicians. Yura, who looks forward, is hopeful and optimistic; Vadim, the moodier one with his bluesy saxophone, tends to look back. Andrei, a former mechanical engineer in a Soviet factory, has come armed with knives that he hopes to sell in Budapest’s bustling marketplace. Amidst bohemian living arrangements, each couples with someone: Yura, with a Welsh woman, who finds that “[p]eople are really living [in Budapest]”; Vadim, with a Texan; Andrei, with his landlady, a language tutor. One of these sets becomes a married couple.
     Writer-director Ibolya Fekete’s film is an appalling mediocrity despite her intention to ground her atmospheric fiction in the reality of faux-documentary evocations and reconstructions. Street scenes pulsate; handheld camera becomes especially jittery inside the active marketplace. Snippets of conversation fit the Altmanian zigzagging that the film pursues among its main characters. Every now and then we hear something of note; for instance, one Russian explains to another, “[The Hungarians] had their revolution [in 1956], and we crushed them.” But mostly the talk is as mundane as the shots are boring. The two Western women are thinly realized. The sudden violent death of one of the characters feels contrived, and the “taking over of the scene” by gangsters, which ought to have been devastating, has little impact.