Adrien Brody - László Tóth
Felicity Jones - Erzsébet Tóth
Guy Pearce - Harrison Lee Van Buren
Joe Alwyn - Harry Lee Van Buren
Raffey Cassidy - Zsófia
Stacy Martin - Maggie Van Buren
Alessandro Nivola - Attila
Summary
The meat of nearly 3h 30 goes something like this.
Overture
After being sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Hungarian-Jewish born Holocaust survivor and trained architect László Tóth emigrates to America and looks for work while staying with his cousin Attila in Philadelphia.
Part 1 - The Enigma of Arrival 1947-1952
Title is a 1987 autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul.
László gets involved in Attila's furniture business and they're soon commissioned to renovate a library of a home owned by millionaire industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren at the behest of his son Harry.
Harrison arrives home early and enraged at their work, fires them both, with Attila blaming László for the failed project.
A few years later, László is now a heroin addict and lives in charity housing with Gordon whom he earlier befriended.
When his library is lauded by the architectural community, Harrison commissions László and Gordon to build a community centre as a tribute to his late mother.
Also, Harrison arranges for his lawyer to expedite the immigration of his wife Erzsébet and niece Zsófia.
Part 2 - The Hard Core of Beauty 1953-1960
Named after a chapter in the book Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor.
Due to their suffering at the camp, László discovers wife has osteoporosis and niece is mute.
László clashes with contractors during the centre's construction and following the derailment of a train carrying materials, Harrison goes ape shit and fires everybody.
In New York City, László works as a drafter, Erzsébet is a writer and Zsófia is able to speak again. They later make Aliyah and move to Jerusalem.
But after Harrison rapes an intoxicated László in a mine, his life unravels.
Epilogue - The First Architecture Biennale 1980
A retrospective of László's work is held in Venice and an aging László explains the centre (finally completed after a 10-year hiatus), was designed to resemble concentration camps and supposed to function as a way of processing trauma.
The presence of the past
Performances were impressive (even if AI was used to improve Brody and Jones' accents) and Lol Crawley's cinematography is gorgeous, but I fail to understand why everybody is having kittens.
Preposterous running time was more painful than toothache and easily 90m too long.
Roughly halfway through (before Part 2), an intermission includes a real-time countdown clock.
Creative decision is arguably a good idea, but who needs 15 minutes for a toilet break?
Apart from presenting women as discardable sex objects, Harrison violating László in the most humiliating way possible isn't intelligibly connected to anything that went before.
There's also some very odd script choices. For example, Jones suggests Brody should get his nose 'fixed'.
Was this supposed to be some kind of joke?
In memory of Scott Walker.
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