Family Nest

Father and Son: Gábor Kun and László Horváth

Béla Tarr's Empty Nest, his debut feature released in 1979, is a grimy, seamy, and effective slice of social realism. Tarr, then 22, shoots in black and white with a handheld camera at eye level with his non-professional cast. The film documents a young couple with a small child forced to live in their in-laws cramped Budapest flat. There are numerous spats, usually sparked by the patriarch conveying his low opinion of his daughter in law, and Tarr's suffocating close-ups ably convey the claustrophobia experienced by the apartment dwellers. Tarr wanted this film to be a finger in the eye to the Kádár regime and its attendant cultural kitsch, represented in the film by an operetta on television and various schlock pop numbers on the soundtrack. In this he succeeds, but in a fashion far removed from his later, more formal films.

The film was largely improvised and it is remarkable how fully realized the performances are, particularly Gábor Kun as the sulfuric paterfamilias. The male of the species is particularly monstrous in Family Nest treating females as if they were chattel. The Hungary portrayed is grim and unhealthy. Glimmers of humanity remain, but they are faint. The socialist order is portrayed as irrevocably broken with working man and woman getting the short end of the stick, just as they did in feudal capitalist Hungary. Tarr's view of his country has not mellowed with age despite the shift in his technical approach. Elements of the grim realism of Family Nest remain in Tarr's work, but he has varied his somber palette with lunatic dollops of expressionism and surrealism.