Hukkle opens with an old man (Ferenc Band) suffering the hiccups as he poors himself a can of milk then goes outside & sits on a bench by the road hiccuping. As he watches people go by on the old dirt road, we follow various of these nameless characters for glimpses of their daily lives in a Hungarian village.
There is no dialog, no story, just highly pictorial cinematography of nature, rugged faces of rather dirty Hungarian peasants, close-ups of people eating & chewing, going to a funeral, sleeping & snoring, working & lazying about, gleaning honey from the bee hive, breeding pigs, peeing, riding a bicycle, & all sorts of unimportant picaresque things, culminating in a wedding & a bit of folk music & the geezer by the road still hukkling.
It's all quite pretty & just about as boaring as anything can get without becoming totally intolerable. Watch it as an act of meditation & you'll probably find it rewarding. Clever cuts from human lives to the lives of ants or a mole or a frog make the tedium worthwhile. If it hadn't waited until the end for the folk tunes I think it might even have been a fine little movie.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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