“One of the unsung masters of Hungarian cinema,” says the press blurb about Zoltán Huszárik, director of Szindbád. Full disclosure: I’d never heard of him before a review copy of the Blu-ray boxset fell onto my doormat. It contains Huszárik’s entire collected output, two films and a handful of shorts.
Hungary is quite a source of “masters” of cinema, from Alexander Korda and Bela Lugosi to Michael Curtiz, Vilmos Zsigmond, Béla Tarr and György Fehér. Having now watched Szindbád (with Csontváry and the shorts still to come), I’d happily add Huszárik to that list. He’s clearly a remarkable talent, with a visual style all his own and a confidence to match.
His film has no plot, not really. It’s little more than the reminiscence by a man on his deathbed about all the women he’s bedded over his lifetime. He’s a Don Juan, an adventurous privateer of the boudoir, hence, I suppose, the maritime name Sinbad (anglicised version).
A warning: this is not a film for lovers of smut. Huszárik approaches his subject seriously, sensually, in a woozy recreation of life in the fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian empire, where our handsome, moustachioed hero (Zoltán Latinovits, a Hungarian Marcello Mastroianni) works hard to get women into bed, waxing poetical and spiritual because the best way, it seems, to separate a pretty young thing from her chastity is to shift conversation off the physical plane and onto the metaphysical.
There is an amused intelligence at work here and Huszárik often lays it on thick. “Life is only worth living for women,” an elderly barber tells Szindbád while he’s snipping at his hair. Cut instantly to Szindbád, later, in a cemetery fondling the exquisite breasts of a half-undressed woman. Yes, quite.
Between scenes of Szindbád’s many conquests picturesque palate cleansers: the screen filled with defocused flowers, glistening silk, delicate lace, plush velvet – like Instagram snaps with all the prettifying filters turned on. And more generally in this film, all the sumptuousness associated with the fin de siècle Europe: flock wallpaper, peacock feathers, lushness you can almost smell.
Studding it all, elevating it beyond just a collection of pretty pictures, two things. Huszárik repeatedly contrasts what people say about themselves with almost subliminal flashbacks to the truth of the matter. A disdainful matron speaks of her virtue as a young girl, followed by a flash-reveal of what she was really like. Again, funny.
The other: a rebuke to the permissive 1970s with the suggestion that the single-minded pursuit of pleasure is less than noble, that Szindbád might be a vampire, of sorts, living off the youth and vigour of his conquests.
“You seem like a decent fellow,” a beautiful flower seller says to him at one point. She commits suicide not long after. “I never got involved with women who wanted me,” Szindbád says later, deep in his reminiscence. “That’s how I’ve stayed young.” Again the suggestion of vampirism.
The writer and singer George Melly once described his loss of libido as he hit old age as “like being unchained from a lunatic”. He was borrowing from the ancient Greeks and Huszárik is on the same trail in this film. Catching the lunacy of the sexual impulse, its relentlessness, its ceaseless looking, assessing, angling for opportunity, he spangles his film with a flash of a breast, some flawless skin, razor-blade cheekbones, or glistening golden hair, often dropping these money shots in à propos nothing at all.
This is not a film you follow so much as give yourself up to. Wallow in it, it’s worth it.
As to physical media, I’d recommend anything based on the 2019 restoration, like the Second Run Blu-ray I watched. Though I’m no expert on this sort of thing, I reckon you could take issue with its artificial grain but the gorgeousness of the restored colours will likely kill any other objections – this is a spectacular film.
Zoltan Huszárik: Collected Works – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
