HUKKLE

Who, truly, is at the top of the proverbial food chain? The tasty question haunts this singularly playful, yet quietly ominous pageant of life, death, culpability and consumption in a sleepy Hungarian village. While the roving camera, ever hungry for images, takes to the air, under the water, beneath the soil (and, in a few remarkable moments, behind the scenes of the film itself), the pace of daily existence plods on. An old man smiles through a bout of continual hiccups (the source of the nonsense word title); laborers toil in the fields to make bread; a beekeeper harvests honey; two pigs mate under a farm couple's approving eyes; weathered women dutifully prepare meals for their husbands; a pet cat dies suddenly and unexpectedly; and a father catches a large fish not far from where the sunken corpse of a man lies on the riverbed. Behind the seemingly random events of what might seem a pastoral Jacques Tati comedy is a cunning structure. For spread out before you are bite-sized portions of a murder narrative, its clues and ambiance flavored with brilliant photography and presented sans dialogue (except for some vital, subtitled song lyrics near the end). Gy?rgy P?lfi's one-of-a-kind debut feature, which is Hungary's submission for this years Foreign Language Oscar, marks him as a masterful young chef of international motion pictures.