Delta

Brutal symbolism

The film’s dénouement follows an artistic scene of such tension and symbolic brutality that the final act is almost an anticlimax. The brother and sister throw a housewarming party at the riverside and invite the entire village for dinner in an attempt at reconciliation. They serve fish and bread soaked in pálinka, and the villagers eat and drink with mute abandon, tearing at the bread, dropping it in the dirt and picking it up again, eating with their hands. The tension builds.

“We wanted to do a very brutal scene,” says Mundruczó, “but of course you cannot be brutal [with people] in films because the audience doesn’t believe it’s really happening, so you try to find some object which can be brutalised. I think the bread is a very holy thing, because you use it every day and you eat the bread and it’s symbolic for Christians and symbolic everywhere. When the bread is dirty it’s very brutal, but you are not hitting or pushing someone; it’s not brutal in a general way, but in an objective way. So we use some very clean or holy things and make them very dirty and I think it works very well. Of course it’s symbolic, but in the real time, in realistic ways, it’s also working for us, because when you see how they are tearing the bread it’s just brutal, aggressive.”

The sister leaves the group to fetch watermelon for the crowd and on her way back to the party she is waylaid by a group of young men who force her to drink palinka and eat the melon, which she must dig out of the rind with her hands. It is the most symbolically violent scene in the movie, but the violence must be supplemented by the viewer’s imagination.

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