32/20
between March 16 and May 5, 2023
When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee postwar Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are forever changed by a mysterious and wealthy client. Filming took place over a total of 34 days. It was shot in Budapest, Hungary and in Carrara, Italy.. Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.: When dogs get sick, they often bite the hands of those who fed them, until someone puts them down in mercy.
Brutalist is full of surprises
The characters are not what you expect – not in the final Scooby Doo way, but in more subtle and incremental ways in which real people are revealed – they unfold over time, in a new context, or when forced by circumstance. Here the circumstance is post-World War II-horror. Adrien Brody’s Laszlo, a Jewish architect who escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, heads for the welcoming arms of America—or confronts them—in a frenetic opening sequence that evokes the fact that he was literally born by the Statue of Liberty. His becomes a perpetual voyage of navigation through the variety of life’s horrors: existential, professional, familial, intimate—never taking his eyes off the prize of great achievement, never assessing the value of that prize.
What’s the lesson?
Is it the shameful discovery that his success was born not in spite of his trauma, but because of it? Do we have a duty to abuse? To the forces of culture, country, power, and those who wield it, in building our brutal legacies (and homelands)? Are our lives the gasoline that burns on the way to a more meaningful place?
But there’s no novel
The film is charming, it looks cool, and it’s not boring (did you hear it was long?). It seems to be based on an old novel—a mysterious tome I’d love to dig up for some of the details the film refuses to share. This aging man’s search for meaning becomes ours, too. And any better understanding of Lazslo’s arrival, his family’s machinations, his country, and his rootlessness, for better or worse, is up to us to build…