‘Explanation for Everything’ Review: A Timely Look at Culture Wars in Central Europe
Explanation for Everything, Hungarian director Gabor Reisz’s third feature (after For Some Inexplicable Reason and Bad Poems), is set very specifically in present-day Budapest.
The talky script, which revolves around an argument between a high-school student and his family over a remark made by a teacher during the student’s final oral exam, makes many references to events and people from Hungary’s history and current political scene — most of which, apart from the country’s neo-fascist Prime Minister Victor Orban, will be unfamiliar to viewers beyond Central Europe. And yet the core conflicts depicted here between generations, and especially between left- and right-wing citizens, will be immediately familiar to viewers everywhere, particularly in places like the United States, Brazil, Italy or Israel, where political polarization has become even more acute and rancorous. Much like some of the naturalistic, dialectical dramas from Romania, which this resembles, Reisz’s work runs a little longer at two and a half hours than it necessarily needs to, but the payoff is worth it.
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In the film’s press notes, Reisz writes about how the film was partly borne out of a conflict at his old alma mater, the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest, when the state, under the autocratic Orban, forced a reorganization of the institution, depriving it of autonomy. Faculty and students held protests, which Reisz also attended, inspiring him to try and find a way to reflect current political divisions within his own fictional work. Explanation for Everything is the result, and while it unfolds in a high school rather than a university, the script by Reisz and Eva Schulze touches on many of the same third rails that run through the wider political discourse these days around education.
Divided into an assortment of chapters anchored to key figures in the story, the film overlaps the coverage so that we can see the same pivotal events happening from different points of view, Rashomon-style. First up is gormless, lovelorn high-school senior Abel (Gaspar Adonyi-Walsh, endearingly deadpan), who is supposed to be cramming for his final oral exam in history while all he can think about is his friend Janka (Lilla Kizlinger), on whom he has a massive crush. Abel’s parents, Judit (Krisztina Urbanovits) and architect Gyorgy (Istvan Znamenak), are heavily invested in their only child’s academic success and give him pop quizzes in history over the dinner table. When asked, “Who was the Iron Lady?” for instance, Abel gets it half right by identifying her as Margaret Thatcher, but describes her erroneously as the President of the United Kingdom. Clearly, history is not his best subject.
On the day, Abel shows up for his exam in dress shoes that are agony to wear and his best dark blazer, which still has his Hungarian nationality pin on it from when he wore it last. Everybody in the country wears pins like this on the day they commemorate Hungary’s independence. But over the years, wearing this pin on any other day — perhaps a bit like wearing an American flag on any day other than the 4th of July — can signify right-wing nationalist sympathies. Abel is so nervous and discombobulated by seeing Janka be comforted by their history teacher Jakab (Andras Rusznak) when she gets emotional after her own oral exam, that he completely blows it and can barely utter a word during his own exam. Jakab and his colleagues are compelled to fail him. Immediately after explaining that these are the rules and that they have no choice, the man-bun-adorned Jakab can’t resist asking Abel why he’s wearing a nationalist pin on his lapel. A hard cut doesn’t show us Abel’s reaction, but the consequences roll out across the movie.
When Gyorgy, a right-wing Orban supporter, finds out that Abel failed history, he is incensed and shames his son for letting down the family. But when Abel mentions Jakab’s comment about the pin, Gyorgy fixates on that and uses it to accuse the teacher of being biased against Abel because of his supposed political sympathies. Gyorgy and Jakab clashed before at a parent-teacher conference months ago, so it doesn’t take much to rekindle their natural antipathy — especially since Jakab obviously does have left-wing sympathies judging by the way he questions an elderly survivor of the 1956 uprising for a documentary he’s making as a side hustle. The man-bun is also a giveaway.
Soon, the incident snowballs, with phone calls to the school principal, interventions from opportunistic reporters from populist newspapers who fan the flames of the story, and a combative meeting between Jakab and Gyorgy when the former tries to smooth things out with a home visit. But Reisz and Shulze skillfully resist the temptation to make the lefties good and the right-wingers bad. We see that Gyorgy may be a bit of a bully, but he’s a man frustrated as he sees colleagues shipping off to other countries in the west while guys like him are left behind. Likewise, we see how self-absorbed Jakab is, how he’s a bit of a chauvinist at home who expects his long-suffering wife Dorka (Eliza Sodro) to take their two elementary-school children on the bus when he needs the family car for his pet projects. (Also, that man-bun is hideous.)
Letting the camera bob, weave and wobble as it dances around the actors who are obviously somewhat improvising their dialogue at times gives the whole film a very loosey-goosey, quasi-Dogme-95 feel, while also recalling the work of Romanian New Wave auteurs like Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Radu Muntean and Radu Jude with their signature mixture of black humor and tragedy. The stakes are not life or death in this film, but the views depicted represent a microcosm of the forces currently tearing countries apart everywhere. It’s not hard to see where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie for the most part, but the attempt to try and understand the points of view of people quite unlike themselves is both effective and commendable.
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