Is The Brutalist (2024) a Hungarian Film?
While The Brutalist was filmed in Hungary, made by many Hungarians, and depicts Hungarians in leading roles, it remains a film quintessentially about America.
This year’s top Oscar contender, The Brutalist, has several Hungarian connotations. The film follows architect László Tóth (Adrian Brody) who flees from 1940s Hungary to the United States, where he builds a new life. Shortly, his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) follows him. Adrian Brody stated in several interviews how he intends to honour the sacrifices and story of his family with the film (Brody’s grandmother emigrated to the US after the 1956 revolution as a child).
The film does not hide the Hungarianness of its two main characters. The first lines in The Brutalist are spoken in Hungarian and it is spoken quite frequently in the film throughout. Both Brody and Jones manage to speak decent Hungarian (though allegedly AI was involved with some of the more tricky sounds). Perhaps due to his heritage, Brody’s Hungarian is better than that of Jones. But when speaking English, Jones’ Hungarian accent is impeccable and one could easily believe that she is actually Hungarian. Brody on the other hand nails the English-speaking Hungarian accent for the most part but sometimes shifts slightly into Italian accent territory.
With the Hungarian language taking such a central role, can we consider The Brutalist a Hungarian film?
There are several ways to answer that question. First, it is worth noting that the film, despite being set in the United States, was filmed almost entirely in Hungary. A major American motion picture being filmed in Hungary is not unique; the Dune films, last year’s Oscar contender Poor Things, and Blade Runner 2049 were all filmed in Budapest’s Origo Studios. As such, many of these films had Hungarian talent working on them (and produced two Hungarian Oscar winners in production design, Zsuzsanna Sipos won for Dune and Zsuzsa Mihalek for Poor Things).
But The Brutalist took this to a new level. Frequent visitors of Keleti Station in Budapest will find the Pennsylvania railway station, where László greets his wife and niece after years of separation, uncannily familiar. Adrian Brody’s Pennsylvanian coal shovelling was actually filmed in Csepel in Budapest. Teleki Square synagogue also features prominently in the film. The credits include many Hungarians, most notably Dávid Jancsó, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work. The vast majority of the entire post-production team also consisted of Hungarians.
But The Brutalist did not only have Hungarians behind the camera. Several up and coming, young Hungarian actors were featured in the film in minor roles, such as Fekete Pont’s lead actress Anna Mészöly, the rap-musical Larry’s lead Benett Vilmányi, as well as breakout stars of the hit HBO show The Informant Mariann Hermányi and Abigél Szőke, the former two in memorable roles.
But what about the film’s themes? Are they primarily of American or Hungarian nature? The answer is definitely the former. The Brutalist is about the American Dream. Clocking in at three and a half hours, the film is neatly divided into two parts with an intermission. The first half is about the truths of the American Dream; if you work hard and allow yourself to be exploited, with some luck, you can make it. The second half is about the lies of the American Dream: just because you made it, it does not mean that you won’t continue to be exploited, have to grind continuously in order not to fall back into poverty, or that the wider American society will fully accept you.
One could argue that, especially with the darker second half, this is a more negative take on the American Dream, which does match up with the Hungarian national character. It could also be argued that leaving the country behind and embarking on a successful career outside Hungary is the quintessential experience for 20th, and increasingly 21st, century Hungarians. Michael Curtiz, Ede Teller, Andy Vajna, or Katalin Karikó would likely relate to several elements of The Brutalist.
However, what makes The Brutalist primarily an American film thematically is something often overlooked in the reviews. Namely, that the film is also about the process through which László becomes American. At one point in the film, he clearly states that he’d never return to Hungary and the only time another relocation is considered, the only realistic option is Israel. László consciously tries to leave his Hungarian identity behind, so much so that he and Erzsébet start talking to each other in English (though at the emotional high point of the film, when László and Erzsébet are finally able to make love for the first time after a dry spell induced by physical and mental problems, they do switch back to Hungarian - a clever directorial choice).
Though less common in the present day, leaving the language of one’s country of origin behind is an experience fairly common for many immigrants in the 20th century and one of the most common rites of passage for many Americans. It is “the price of the ticket” as the legendary American writer James Baldwin, who knew 20th-century America so well, put it in his 1985 essay:
“Know whence you came. This is precisely what the generality of white Americans cannot afford to do. They do not know how to do it - : as I must suppose. They come through Ellis Island where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So with a painless change of a name, and in a twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American. Later, in the midnight hour, the missing identity aches. One can neither assess nor overcome the storm of the middle passage. One is mysteriously shipwrecked forever in the Great New World. (...) The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white - : and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less.”
Of course, especially with its second part, The Brutalist challenges Baldwin’s notions of the Price of the Ticket somewhat. After all, the antisemitism and exploitation László faces are very much part of the price of his ticket to America on top of having to leave his Hungarian identity behind. Nevertheless, László’s Hungarianness is primarily a device the film uses to tell the story of the ticket and the phenomenon of what Baldwin calls “the midnight hour” and the aches of grappling with the realities of the newfound homeland.
The film does well to show quite extensively that László was Hungarian in order to depict what he had to lose to settle in America. But for the film, the important thing is what he becomes and how. Or, as the final lines of The Brutalist put it:
“No matter what the others try and sell you: it is the destination, not the journey."
Ábel Bede