European Films

Taxidermia, György Pálfi’s follow up to his debut film, the gently quirky hiccough tale Hukkle, pulls out all the stops in a vicious attack on the senses that leaves no ugly truth about mankind unsaid -- nor unseen. It is a tribute to Pálfi’s considerable talents that the film is also compulsively watchable, despite (or perhaps because of) the litres of semen, vomit and blood that embody its triptych structure. Following three generations of men, it focuses on the three male primal urges: sex, food and bodily health and -prowess.

Taxidermia is such a stuffed, baroque work of art that multiple readings of its contents are possible, but its focus on bodily fluids and the primal urges of man are an obvious entry into the story. Working from two short stories by Hungarian author Lajos Parti Nagy, which Pálfi remodelled to become three loosely interconnected stories about three male generations in one family, Taxidermia is obsessed with the gross and mundane qualities of life and puts these on screen in compositions of eerie beauty.

Moroscovany is a hare-lipped, low-life soldier who is only capable of thinking with his penis. Even one of the hens in the courtyard is annoyed, as demonstrated by its attack on his stiff tool when the soldier is humping a hole in the wall from inside the wooden shack he calls home. The scene is darkly comic and also points to one of Pálfi’s obvious leitmotivs: the similarities and differences between animals and humans. Having sex is a primal urge forced upon us by nature, but we would not be human if we could not control it, however hard this may be. Moroscovany is obsessed with his penis, dreaming it spits fire and can ejaculate to the stars. He also seems to dream of the portly wife of his superior who lives next door and might have penetrated her, or a bathtub full of pork readied for winter that somehow transformed itself into her. Fact is, nine months later she gives birth to a beautiful baby boy – with a pig’s tail.

In the second section the boy has grown up (and much, much wider) to become a professional competitive eater specialised in cross-swallowing. Kálmán defends Hungary in Soviet championships and hopes to one day travel to the milk-and-honey country and culinary hotspot that is Norway, where the Eating World Cup will be held. Until then he gets by eating and practising vomiting techniques (it is an allowed and even recommended practice between rounds). His newlywed wife is also a champion eater, at least until she becomes pregnant with their son Lajos, who will grow up to be the taxidermist that the title alludes to in the third section. Probably due to his line of work, Lajos’ desire for food is nothing like the unrivalled appetite of his father, who now permanently lives in the same room, unable to move because his chocolate addiction (“Why take of the wrapper? Like this, I can eat 170 bars more each hour”) has made him too fat.   

If Hukkle coasted on its occasional off-beat humour, leisurely pace and sense of countryside simplicity, then Taxidermia is a frenetic orgy of human activity as applied to its surroundings as well as inside its own body. It pulsates, swallows, digests, infects, regurgitates and spits out in a continuous battle for survival that is as savage as anything in the animal kingdom. Though the film includes scenes of sexual penetration, beheadings, slaughter, and other such niceties, Pálfi’s film never feels as an attempt to shock or create something expressly off-putting or artistically gutsy. In Taxidermia’s universe, which spans three generations in exactly ninety minutes, his images simply makes sense, which is the director’s greatest achievement. Pálfi finds both horror and beauty in the smelly, chaotic mess of life, which is exactly what great artists do. Not bad for someone who has just made his second film.

Boyd van Hoeij named Taxidermia the Best Film of 2006. 

This film was screened as part of the 2006 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. 

Buy the DVD at: amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.de. 

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