Title: Dealer
Year: 2004
Duration: 160 min.
Origin: HUNGARY
Color: C
Genre: DRAMA
Technical details: 35 MM
Production: ANDRAS MUHI AND ISTVAN MAJOR FOR INFORG STUDIO, FILMTEAM, BOJE BUCK PRODUKTION, SAT.1
Director: Benedek Fliegauf
Actors: Felícián Keresztes (Dealer); Barbara Thurzó (Barbara); Lajos Szakács (Father); Anikó Szigeti (Wanda); Edina Balogh (Bogi); Dr. Dusán Vitanovics (Dragan); Katalin Mészáros (hallucinogenic mushroom girl).
Story: Benedek Fliegauf
Screenplay: Benedek Fliegauf
Cinematography: Péter Szatmári
Editing: Balázs Féjja and Károly Szalai
Music: Raptors' Kollektíva (Benedek Fliegauf and Zoltán Tamási)
Set design: Zsuzsa Mihalek
Costumes: Mónika Matyi
Dealer - Benedek Fliegauf - sub ITA I copy/paste from Iacopo Landrini the following:
In an anonymous, lunar, and deserted Eastern European city, a man on a bike moves silently, delivering doses of drugs to a desperate clientele.
Through his clients, the direction tells the little we come to know about the man.
Here you need to catch your breath and have chocolate, kittens, or anything that can lift your spirits because you will probably need it, and in large doses.
Fliegauf does not mince words and depicts addiction through the protagonist’s loneliness and his role as a bearer of a suffocating apathy toward ethics.
The protagonist cares neither about his personal gain nor about the consequences of his actions, almost mechanically covering the distances that separate him from client to client, delivering what is necessary and moving on.
Friendship and affection do not seem to shake this character in any way, who becomes increasingly like a personification of fate that has already eclipsed every form of life from the streets and parks and now hunts down the last agonizing survivors house by house, misery by misery, putting a full stop on lives that probably ended long ago.
The cinematography is like a perpetual twilight that spares not even the faces, lighting them up in some cases with a fleeting and ephemeral glow only after taking heroin, bringing onto the film an illusion of life, a momentary sparkle of hope induced by the drug that distracts those who take it for a fleeting moment from their own misery.
Dealer is a very slow and long (over two hours) dive into a human abyss utterly devoid of moralizing and sugarcoating: more than the need to describe and judge, the need to portray reality without filters and without any mercy becomes pressing.
You might find it boring, certainly slow, unbearable for its exhausting pessimism and its lack of life and humanity, yet from a directorial point of view I find it a work that excels in vision and imagery narration, with its very long silences filled with the emptiness of the spaces of a gigantic modern necropolis.
For me, a unique must-see, but definitely not for everyone; it can repel and will try to do so in every possible way.
Recommended, but Titolo: Anno: Durata: Origine: Colore: Genere: tecniche: Produzione: Regia: Attori: Soggetto: Sceneggiatura: Fotografia: Montaggio: Musiche: Scenografia: Costumi: segue: edulcorazione:
