FOMO Bem Mozi Budapest
Feb 5th 2020
It was exciting for me to come across a modern Hungarian film that was being shown with subtitles so that I could attend and enjoy. This was thanks to the wonderful Bem Mozi and the above film.
The film focuses on a group of (fairly) privileged teens living in Budapest (great fun location-spotting btw…) who have created their own online/YouTube group The Wolves – as per for today – and fill their feed with them basically being prats and dumb teens. They go to a party, a girl is assaulted/raped and then vanishes for a few days before re-appearing. The central character whom we largely follow due to this comes to a better understanding of himself and fundamentally starts to grow up so that by the end of the film he is (somewhat) more mature than he was at the start. Not a greatly original story arc but well told and it was the cinematography that was the best and most interesting feature of the film.
I liked the opening in particular which was a very rapid and quite sustained section of the audience viewing their YouTube antics as if at a computer. Very rapid, hand-held ‘crazy’ shots which well established the nature of the group and throughout the film much of the story was told through the phone recordings of the group – a good example of the medium being the best way to convey the message. Quite a bit of this was, to put it mildly, pretty strong stuff – but that well represented the lack of filters that people such as they have with regards to the recording of what they do. I reckon teens have always done and behaved in similar ways; what is different now is the fact that it is all recorded and put online
The world that was shown/created was similar to that in Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero and those nihilistic novels of the 80’s (and American Psycho of course…) but this did not seem to me like a pale and outdated rehashing of the same territory. It had some individuality and the characters were in some more slightly more sympathetic.
A good film, worth seeing and would be interested to see other work by this director. As more unusual have attached trailer below.