The inhibition threshold to look behind the heavy doors of German gas chambers in cinema films has dropped noticeably in recent years. Even the controversies about the “unrepresentable”, as “Shoah” director Claude Lanzmann put it almost thirty years ago about Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”, sound less apodictic today. The question of ethics and aesthetics, which Lanzmann still identified as one, have become decoupled from one another – perhaps to the same extent that anti-Semitism has assumed ever more subtle forms in society more than seventy years after the Holocaust.
It is often less naivety than sheer arrogance when a director dares to look into the German death factories: the end point of humanity and Western civilization. Hungary’s Kornél Mundruczó is certainly not lacking in self-confidence.
Only a few European arthouse directors have made it their trademark to give their films, which are essentially small, an epic political dimension – which often runs counter to the author’s intention. In 2017’s “Jupiter’s Moon,” a fugitive becomes a messianic figure. And in his last film “Pieces of a Woman” he films his leading actress Vanessa Kirby in an uncut half-hour birth scene.
Discomfort is almost instantaneous in Evolution. A group of men enter a dark room without a word and start manically scrubbing the walls and floors. Not a word is spoken, but the more determined the men go about their work, the more the scenario becomes surreal. One of them finds hair leftovers in the wall paneling, soon they pull together (still silent) absurdly long tufts of hair out of holes that open up. At some point they hear a baby crying, which they pull out of a crack in the ground. A wonder! The miracle of childbirth is a recurring theme of Mundruczó and his partner Kata Wéber, who again wrote the screenplay.
The final shot of the first chapter of “Evolution” then already seems like the rebirth of mankind, from the ashes of civilization. A military jeep whisks the newborn to safety as the camera rises into the air, capturing the concentration camp barracks that seem to stretch to the horizon.
This odd overture, utterly disparate in tone, is just the starting point for a much larger theme treated in Evolution by Mundruczó and Wéber, whose mother survived the German concentration camps (and now lives in Berlin). Even the title has two meanings. On the one hand, it is about how future generations are shaped, on the other hand, about the consequences of the Holocaust in their most everyday effects: the resentment, the “completely normal” anti-Semitism.
The fact that Mundruczó has to start all over again at Auschwitz in order to end up in a German apartment in the second chapter – where the now 60-year-old Eva (Lili Monori), who survived the concentration camp as a baby, is sitting with her daughter Lena – is not the only reason to do with Weber’s own biography. No matter how Mundruczó shifts the focus, from panorama to chamber drama, he is always concerned with finding a pars pro toto in the vignette.
He accepts the fact that these equations are sometimes skewed – and this is not entirely unproblematic. In this logic, the episode in the kitchen, which condenses an entire life story into a monologue, is just an interlude. Lena (Annamária Láng) endures this. She not only worries about her mother, but above all about her son Jónás (Goya Rego), who is supposed to go to a Jewish school because he is being bullied by his classmates because of his origins.
The fact that these three episodes mesh so neatly also has something to do with the origin of the material; “Evolution” is based on a play by Mundruczó and Wéber. For their film adaptation, however, they found a cameraman in Yorick Le Saux who translates the continuity of the story into an uncut flow of images – another kind of cinematic boasting, but this time it even works out formally. This is how “evolution” develops out of the traumas of the past. Looking back is followed by a step forward. And so it is only logical that the film, which begins as a Holocaust miracle, ends as a coming-of-age hope.
