‘Evolution’: Kornel Mundruczó’s Drama Is A Misguided Three-Parter About The Legacy of the Holocaust [Cannes Review]

One should perhaps not read too much into the fact that the press screening of Kornel Mundruczó‘s “Evolution” was timed to coincide with the final of the UEFA European Football Championship. But if playing it to an inevitably thinned-out crowd is hardly a mark of confidence, the lack of faith is sadly well-placed: Mundruczó’s return to Cannes is just as messy as his 2017 Competition entry, “Jupiter’s Moon,” confused and glib and at times in even more dubious taste than that story of a refugee gifted with inexplicable, messianic superpowers. 

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A tripartite tale that the press notes assure me is about how the legacy of the past echoes onto future generations, “Evolution” is all the more dispiriting for those of us who fell for “Pieces of a Woman,” Mundruczó’s last film (and last collaboration with partner Kata Weber, also the screenwriter here) – still a remarkable work with a scorcher of a central performance from Vanessa Kirby. There, Mundruczó’s florid directorial style suited the subject matter and always had Kirby’s devastatingly committed turn to anchor its more overwrought moments in something real.  “Evolution,” divided into three distinct chapters that each features a different protagonist, already lacks that single steadying presence. Furthermore, there’s a bizarre clash of tones and textures from one segment to the next that makes the feature feel like an anthology of three scarcely connected short films: a grotesque diorama of Holocaust horror; a hotheaded, haranguing chamber piece; and coming-of-age tale of first love. Individually, they all may have something to recommend them, but yoked together like this; they are forced to reflect one upon the other. It does none of them any favors. 

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First up, the section headed “Eva” where, with grimy, heart-sinking dread, we are in a concrete WWII bunker in which a group of grim-faced soldiers is feverishly, wordlessly, scrubbing at the walls and floors. Like much of the film, the vast majority of this section is filmed, by DP Yorick le Saux, in one long take that feels increasingly like a breath held against the stinging ammoniac odors pervading the stifled air. Suddenly one of the men comes upon a clot of human hair caught in a crack in the wall. Still without a word, another discovers a mat of hair clogging a drain, and soon they’re all heave-hoing together, pulling impossible, grotesque ropes of the stuff out of the walls and floors. This unbroken sequence is ghastly and effective – Mundruczó, as extrovert a filmmaker as ever there was, knows how to put an audience through the wringer. But there’s a sentimentality to his storytelling, too, which is just as unsubtle. At just the point you’re convinced you’re in for a surreal, Holocaust-backdropped horror movie, a baby wails.

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The next segment is named after Lena (Annamária Láng), the daughter of Eva (Lili Monori) who is now a woman in her late 60s. Lena arrives at her mother’s apartment in a fluster, looking for birth certificates to prove her Jewish heritage in order to be able to get her son Jonas into a Jewish school in Berlin, where she now lives. There’s a Farhadian humanist morality play or a Romanian New Wave-esque drama about citizens being ground down under the machinery of state bureaucracy to be made out of this intricate storyline, but this, sadly, delivers neither. Finally, Jonas (Goya Rego), now a young teen in present-day Berlin, is the eponymous protagonist of the third chapter, during which he apparently causes a fire in his school, but also bonds with a smart and self-possessed Muslim girl (Padmé Hamdemir, giving the film’s best and most interesting performance) in his class. It’s quite sweet. 

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Contrary to how he deployed the long take in the justly admired childbirth scene in ‘Pieces’ here, the device, which is used gratuitously across all three segments, becomes the opposite of immersive, a distancing technique that necessitates theatrical choreography and hampers performances. It’s particularly notable in the middle section – simultaneously the meatiest and the least convincing of the three –  with Láng’s performance, already stunted opposite the long bitter monologues given to Eva, especially suffering due to the awkward staging. At one point, she has to leave the apartment in a harried huff, only to return seconds later in an entirely different register. 

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Even with Dascha Dauenhaer‘s score on hand to signal how to feel (over the miraculous ending of the “Eva” section, for example, ghostly voices sing descending arpeggios), and to smooth over the transitions,  the real issue with “Evolution” how little it evolves. There’s a recurring motif of water if you want to find it, and for a while, you might toy with the idea of some sort of elemental theme, with the bunker sunk in the earth, Eva’s flat experiencing a sudden, spectacular flood, and Jonas responsible for a fire. But these threads, intentional or not, don’t add up to much, and when you’re invoking history as fraught as the Holocaust and modern-day issues as raw as anti-Muslim sentiment, it feels borderline irresponsible, or at least like an example of unearned, borrowed interest, to leave so much of the work of interpretation undone. 

Ultimately the point of all this show-offy camerawork and all these fractious exchanges appears to be a limp “things are getting better” – how else to parse a film’s trajectory when it starts with ropes of human hair clotting the drains of a recently liberated concentration camp and ends with a sun-flared inter-faith and inter-ethnic first kiss between teenagers? But maybe “Evolution,” more a scratchpad of half-developed doodles than a feature, will be an expiation of sorts for both Mundruczó and Weber, and better, subtler ideas will prevail in future. Maybe, given his wildly seesawing one-on one-off rhythm since 2014’s excellent “White God,” his next film, “If Not Now, When,” based on the writings of Primo Levi, will be a masterpiece. Tonight, one thing is clear: Should have watched the final instead.  [C-]

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