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Director's Statement
My film THE WITMAN BOYS is adapted from a novel by Göza Csäth (1887 ¬1919), a Hungarian author, his contemporaries were Kafka and Musil. He was one of the most contradictory characters of the Hungarian literature before WWI. He was a neurologist, a writer and also a music critic.
Just before the war his writings were already forecasting its horrors - stories about souls condemned to hell.
As a neurologist he could feel his patients - and his own - guilty consciousness of the world.
As a writer he described a feverish bleak and apathetic inhuman world. He used to "dissect" his character's souls as a forensic surgeon would dissect corpses.
He was a disparate man and he committed suicide after he had killed his wife.
I was deeply impressed by the obvious insensibility and by the murderous behaviours of those two big Boys.
This total lack of consciousness reminds me of our own social reality ...
Those two different realities are cruel, insensitive and so wickedly indifferent ... - that they allow hatred and murder to achieve our deeds. Moreover, matricide is one of the worst crimes in the world.
So many murders during our historic evolution being probably a way to re-establish a failing order, a policy resuming life.
I wanted to describe one possible way leading to matricide trough the lack of relationships or even trough aberrant or moving ones mixing reality and a violent imaginary world together.
Showing violence itself was not my purpose ... I look for a peculiar rhythm, colours close to monochromy precisely for the audience to watch participate to and understand the images "from inside".
In that sense I feel very dose to Bergman’s and Tarkovski's films, they represent my ideal of film.
In THE WITMAN BOYS as in my previous films, I have been trying to re-create particular and fascinating atmospheres but I don't necessarily subscribe to them.
These atmospheres remind me of disturbing ones etched in our memories.