Electra, My Love

If you don't dance, Jancso doesn't want you in his revolution

Miklos Jancso's Electra, My Love, from 1974, repeats the phantasmagoric collectivist musical stylings of his Red Psalm to occasionally sublime effect. Loosely based on Lazlo Gyurko's play, the plot borrows elements from the legend, chiefly the revenge aspect, but jettisons large chunks of that material. The film concludes with Electra and Orestes ascending to the heavens in a red helicopter (a literal firebird) whilst intoning "...blessed be your name revolution." Jancso is having his cake and eating it, too. Though praising Marxist principles, Electra, My Love can be read as a rebuke to Hungarian strongman Janos Kadar, embodied here as the usurper and murderer of Agamemnon, Aegisthus. The film is certainly a rebuke to the mind control of authoritarian regimes in whatever era. 

The film is best enjoyed by those who do not need the binding backbone of a plot. Electra, My Love is tableau that moves, dances, and sings. The three grounds, fore, middle, and back, are continually shifting in an interweaving of drama, horseplay, folk balladry and dance. The best corollary would be the tapestry like work of Sergei Parajanov, though I don't remember a chorus line of whip wielders in the Armenian's ouevre. Filmed on the plains of the Pannonian Steppes, Jancso stages the musical drama as a pagan fertility rite which is contrasted with the desiccated order Aegisthus seeks to forge through force and propaganda, herding the populace like horses. Like all of Jancso's work, singular and more than a bit nutty.