Twilight (1990): an irresistible challenge that upends the detective genre (Review)

There are many mysteries to unpick in the new Second Run release, but the one that had me the most perplexed is this: what were people watching before this restoration? Because, as Stanley Schtinter’s booklet and several of the interviews on this disc attest, György Fehér’s debut theatrical release was only available on bootleg for many years. Schtinter describes seeing it on a print so degraded, so umpteenth-generation, that it could have come from any era of cinema. Yet watching this Blu-Ray, based on a new 4K restoration from the Hungarian National Film Institute, you can’t imagine Fehér’s film being even faintly legible in any lower-res form. Compared to Twilight, no other film noir deserves the name. The shadows frequently swallow scenes whole, dark and impenetrable enough to bear comparison to the modern experimental work of directors like Albert Serra or Pedro Costa. Except they work in digital, and Fehér’s cinematographer Miklós Gurbán somehow managed this fathomless, harrowing blackness on film.

Gurbán supervised the restoration, standing in for Fehér who sadly died in 2002 after completing just one more feature, 1998’s Passion. That was loosely based on James M Cain’s classic novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Twilight also has its roots in an oft-adapted piece of crime literature. In this case, it’s Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, which has been filmed surprisingly frequently for a book whose roots lie in its author’s reaction against cinema. Dürrenmatt came up with the basic story for a 1958 movie called It Happened in Broad Daylight, but the film’s star Heinz Rühmann overruled its coldly pessimistic ending. To Dürrenmatt, this was at the heart of the critique of detective fiction implied by the novel’s subtitle.

English-speaking audiences may know this novel best as Sean Penn’s 2001 film The Pledge, starring Jack Nicholson. (Schtinter’s booklet notes the odd coincidence of both of Fehér’s films being adaptations of novels that have also been filmed with Nicholson) That redresses Dürrenmatt’s austere, Kafkaesque novel in the clothes of 1970s New Hollywood, not least in its choice of lead. Fehér may be geographically closer to his Swiss source author, but Twilight couldn’t be the product of any country but Hungary. In the bonus features, interviewees including the Quay brothers and Peter Strickland compare Fehér’s film to the extreme long-take cinema of several other Hungarian masters, many of whom have also been introduced to wider audiences by Second Run: István Gaál’s Current, say, or Miklós Janscó’s Silence and Cry. There can be no doubt, however, that the countryman Twilight most resembles is Béla Tarr, and not just because Fehér helped produce Tarr’s epic Sátántangó.

Fehér and Tarr both worked in Hungarian television, where they produced striking adaptations of Shakespeare: Macbeth for Tarr, Richard III for Fehér. They seem to have developed their similar visual styles out of a shared sensibility, and certainly anyone who wishes there were more Béla Tarr films in the world will find their prayers answered by Twilight. It might also work for those who don’t. Tarr’s closest engagement with the crime genre, 2007’s Georges Simenon adaptation The Man from London, brought him some of the least enthusiastic reviews of his career, but Twilight absorbs its genre elements into the world of high arthouse with complete success. Perhaps it helps that Dürrenmatt’s novel is already positioned slightly outside the crime genre, a comment on the tropes and morality of detective fiction rather than a full-blooded example of it.

Equally, it probably helps that Fehér’s film is uncommonly good, sincere and committed. Watching this particular kind of slow cinema, with its roots in the high moral disquisitions of Bergman and Bresson, can require a leap of faith in these cynical, fast-moving times, and there are some moments in Twilight where I just wanted someone to pop a balloon in the background during one of the extremely long pauses. But Fehér is more than capable of providing his own jolts: the first words we hear might be a flat, defeated “I’m very sorry”, but soon afterwards we hear a wail of grief from the parent of a murdered child, loud and unhinged enough to be indistinguishable from maniacal laughter. It’s an astonishing moment.

The pledge of Dürrenmatt’s title is the one its hero makes to that parent, that he won’t rest until he’s found the man who killed her daughter. It’s the kind of thing we expect detectives to do at the start of a detective movie; these days you’d call it a save-the-cat moment. Except Dürrenmatt makes this one, unquestionably good, deed the foundation of an obsession that destroys his hero utterly. Fehér demonstrates his willingness to go as far as his source novel with his staging and framing of the scene where our hero hatches his most terrible plot: to use another child, similar in appearance to the victim, as bait for the killer. We stay on the young girl’s face as the towering detective lures her over, hands her a chocolate and wipes her lips with an obscene tenderness. You end up wondering who, exactly, is the abuser in this story.

It’s a terrifying scene in any adaptation of the book, and it’s hard to disagree that Fehér’s none-more-slow style has elevated it to a new kind of horror. Any quote-unquote “serious” film that engages this closely with genre narrative has to answer the question: are the arthouse trimmings actually adding sophistication and depth, or are they just conning the audience into taking a tawdry thriller seriously? Despite its sordid subject matter, Twilight leaves you in no doubt that it belongs to the former category. Fehér’s signature camera move – a slow mobile shot following its subject side-on – has the feeling of a religious procession, or a road to nowhere, while the appearances of the hero’s senior officer elevate the narrative to a near-Dostoyevskyan level of moral critque. The police want order, framing the first slightly creepy man they find so as to reassure the public that the matter is closed. But the protagonist doesn’t want order, he wants justice, a righteous decision that causes him nothing but trouble.

The extras are testament to the obsession the movie generates. Schtinter’s booklet unfolds into a detective narrative of its own as he searches for the movie’s enigmatic child star Erzsébet Nagy, while the Quays, Strickland, the director James Norton and critic Chris Fujiwara speak eloquently of the spell the film exerts on them. (There is another strange story threaded throughout these essays and interviews, one concerning the film’s soundtrack and its buried homages to Werner Herzog and Kate Bush, which I’ll leave viewers to discover for themselves) Gurbán and editor María Czelik give the perspective of people involved in the film’s production, and there is also a trailer. But the real reason to buy this film, unavailable for so long, is the same as the reason why people climb Everest: because it’s there, and because it’s an irresistible challenge.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE: TWILIGHT (1990)