There comes a point in each of our lives, when we just cannot stand the sight of the profession we are employed in. But for Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi), the issue is slightly more complicated. As a ticket inspector of the Budapest Metro, his job is to kontroll, or to ensure that passengers have bought a ticket or at least have a valid pass. This apparently monotonous and innocuous job turns out to be a daily struggle, primarily because, with almost no exception, the passengers hate kontrollers and their job. In fact, they do so with such ferocity that the ticket inspectors face verbal—and even physical—abuse almost on a daily basis.
In this thankless livelihood, Bulcsú and his crew, comprising the elderly Professor (Zoltán Mucsi), the narcoleptic Muki (Csaba Pindroch), and Lecsó (Sándor Badár), who is afraid of dogs, has just been joined by the bumbling recruit Tibor (Zsolt Nagy). It is through Tibor, or Tibi, who acts as the surrogate for the viewer, that we learn that as if the incessant animosity of the Metro passengers was not enough, a prankster nicknamed Gyalogkakukk (Hungarian for the cartoon character Roadrunner), also known as Bootsie (Bence Mátyássy), who, apparently has eyes at the back of his head like the devil and can run like him, is making life hell for the kontrollers. On top of all this, there have been seven suicides, or jumpers who throw themselves in front of an onrushing subway train, this month alone. Later on, we realise that in most cases, it is a mysterious hooded figure that is pushing people on to the tracks.
Like the gigantic exhaust fan that we see Bulcsú perched upon in one shot of the film, each day in the life of our poker-faced protagonist is an endless cycle. Through a conversation with a passenger named Feri (János Kulka)—from whom Bulcsú hides the reality that he is now employed as a ticket inspector of the very Metro Feri is travelling in—we get to learn that Bulcsú had left a project that he was working on unfinished before he ‘went underground’. Bulcsú explains that he simply got weary of waking up everyday knowing that he had to wage a daily war to prove that he was the best in his work.
But deep down both Bulcsú and we, the viewer, know that the life he has consciously opted for is no better. While he has shut the world above by never venturing out into the sunlight, spending his days boarding one train after another and the nights by sleeping on the platform, he feels equally confined by his daily routine that never veers from waking up, working, and wandering off to sleep, and waking up again to engage in exactly the same sequence of events.
It seems the only time Bulcsú can feel any rush is when he competes in the perilous game of ‘railing’ with one of his rival kontrollers, Gonzó (Balázs Lázár). ‘Railing’ is like Russian roulette. Only difference being it is a footrace and does not involve a revolver, though the stakes are equally high. When the last passenger train leaves, those who are participating in ‘railing’ run after it, following the serpentine tracks. But the objective is not to catch the train ahead of them, but to avoid getting crushed by the ‘midnight express’, the last train that comes after the final passenger train, which never stops at any station, and is always breathing down their necks, and is hot on their heels.
The ‘midnight express’ is nothing but a personification of the past that Bulcsú is running from. That is why, even though he has made a name for himself as a ‘railing’ champion, even after winning another race, his face is not flush with the exhilaration of victory, but cringed with an aura of defeat.
One day, into this dreary life of Bulcsú, appears Szofi (Eszter Balla), a girl in a teddy bear suit. She is the daughter of Béla (Lajos Kovács), who, after being banished from the world above when he could not stop in time because of ‘insufficient braking distance’ now drives one of the subway trains of Budapest Metro. Like the Little Bear constellation, Szofi takes on the role of a guiding star, lighting up Bulcsú’s humdrum existence. For the first time in a long while, Bulcsú starts thinking beyond the frequent fights with the commuters, the boring conversations with his crew members, the menace posed by Bootsie, and the perilous hooded figure.
It is difficult to categorise Kontroll (2003), the first feature length film by the Hungarian filmmaker Nimród Antal. Like its characters who hop, skip, and jump over railway tracks while ‘railing’, the film deftly hopscotches across several genres—drama, mystery, thriller, comedy, and even romance. Filmed in its entirety in a subterranean setting, the brooding atmosphere is lightened both by individual character traits (like Muki collapsing into a narcoleptic fit every time his temper rises) and by the interactions of the kontrollers with passengers without tickets, which vary from the benign (a stuttering man trying in vain to explain his situation) to the bizarre (being handed a lottery ticket in place of a subway ticket; being threatened by a gypsy that she will put a curse on the inspector who had the gall to ask for a ticket; to a guy pulling out a syringe full of blood and wielding it as a weapon).
Kontroll was selected to be a part of the Un Certain Regard category of the Cannes Film Festival in 2004—two decades after the last Hungarian film made it to the prestigious event. Not a small feat by a director making his full-length feature film debut, by any means. Thus, one would have been perfectly justified to hope that the four sets of escalators all moving upward in the final shot of Kontroll would also signify the rise of this talented born-of-Hungarian-parents but raised-in-Los-Angeles filmmaker. Unfortunately, his career graph, since then, has resembled not the final, but the opening shot of Kontroll, wherein all the escalators are seen moving down. The clue possibly lies in the fact that he never went back to his homeland again but decided to heed the call of Hollywood instead for his next three films: the vacuous horror flick Vacancy (2003), the atrocious heist movie Armored (2009), and the pathetic sci-fi offering Predators (2010).
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