Trychydts in English

My first “real” post in 2009 is about an actor and humorist, András Kern. (I am definitely not going to use the English versions of the names, or, at least, not primarily. András is ‘Andrew’, however.)

When I was young, he was a huge favorite of mine. Strange thing, because, looking back, I hardly understood half of his performances. As a kid, I simply did not know enough about the world to get those hidden implications about the absurdit of the Socialist era. He still seemed a genius to me, and I am still convinced that back then, he really was one.

Nowdays he seems to be disappeared — of course, he still acts and directs, he is in our most popular and most deeply, inherently vulgar, and cheaply disgusting semi-political talk show, “Weekly Seven”. Last afternoon, when I was at Mum’s, I laid my hand on some casette tapes — these contained two music albums of his, too. I listened to them at home, I enjoyed them very much — and I thought I understood what happened to him. He was not a genius in general: he was a genius of the last era.

Don’t get me wrong — most probably, he was not compromised more than most of us. He was just the best at reacting to that paticular lifestyle; he could make the most fun about that paticular way of living. Most of us know very little about the reality of Western Europe and America. He understood that and distorted this image even more so the rest of us could see how limited our point of view was. He could show it with an extremely sharp irony that here everything was cheap but few things had real quality. If you wanted to get something done than you were better find a workaround because the official ways were very likely impossible. Then again, few rules were really rules most are just formalities which can be overriden if you had the proper contacts or the proper cheek.

This was what he was best at, and these times are over. Concerning our overall ethical standards, of course, we have still plenty of terra incognita to be conquered but Hungary still become a part of the globalising world. Competition became a part of our life and that was something for an actor graduating in 1970 was probably very hard to understand. After 1989, he was best in the roles which was about people living in that old Hungary falling apart.

Let’s take his performance in Sztracsatella (Stracciatella), for example — this was a really remarkable experience for me.

I could write a small essay just about the title. It refers to Stracciatella (chockolate chips) ice-cream — but in a very Hungarian way. Of course, we had ice cream under the old era, too. Chocolate, lemon, vanilla, and punch (the pink one), most of the time. Maybe strawberry or some other fruit. Stracciatella and the like came with the capitalism; it was nothing special, still, it was new, it was exotic. In the film, it is a real symbol of the ‘modern’ (post-1989) urban lifestyle — it’s a huge bit of exaggeration compared to real life, but a fairly good approximation. The movie was packed with advertisements — firms still had a long way to learn about hidden messages — back then, shouting the name of a certain product on the center of the canvas seemed sophisticated enough. It is about a respected but not very talented conductor with a family falling apart and with a new love he is too much a coward to keep. He still has nothing to feat, because he has his job, so he has a place in the system, and it would be too tiresome to get rid of him.

Kern of course, felt really at home in this movie. Since then, the audience stated to demand less obviously Hungarian films; Kern, however, seemed to have lost his flexibility. Adapting to new times is too much for him.

Of course, this transition is less obvious is theaters; and certainly, when last year we saw him in Play it again, Sam!, we did enjoy ourselves. However, I do not expect him to turn up in some really modern drama, or in a really modern-approach adaptation.

I put in the album Kern, and I feel really nostalgic. This man was, indeed a genius. Too bad he lost track of time — on the other hand, maybe this was the price he had to pay for being a genius of his own time.