MOVIE REVIEW: THE BRUTALIST

 

THIS MOVIE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. It’s long (three-and-a-half hours long) and drags in parts, if I can put in my two-cents worth, but one thing I found interesting is its depiction of post-war America. The story centers around László Toth, a Hungarian refugee and holocaust survivor from the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp who arrives in New York in 1947 to begin a new life. An architect by trade, we see him struggle to make a living and find work commensurate with his talents. In the 1950s he worked at several jobs. One, as a product designer in a friend’s furniture factory, is where he first encounters the rich van Buren family whose patriarch, Harrison van Buren, commissions him to design a home library on his estate.

 

László’s design is so fresh and original that Harrison subsequently commissions him to design and supervise the construction of a community centre in Philadelphia in honour of Harrison’s late mother. The project will take years to complete, and we never actually see the completed building—only glimpses of foundation walls, staircases, interior walls, all made of concrete. The camera work is energetic throughout, with rapidly changing perspectives, inverted horizons,* and constant movement along and within the slowly evolving structure of the community centre interspersed with scenes depicting László’s struggles to adapt to his life as an immigrant. The camera’s almost dizzying activity is a visual metaphor describing the drive, energy, and vibrancy of post-war America, with its brash, ‘can do’ confidence, its roaring economy, and seemingly limitless possibilities. However, inter-woven between scenes at the construction site are László’s struggles for more funding from Harrison, and his dogged insistence that his architectural vision be made manifest in the tonnes of poured concrete and rebar. 

 

An example of Brutalist architecture 

AT ONE POINT, there is a depiction of a narrow interior stair, whose ceiling is thirty feet or more high, that reminded me of stairs inside an Egyptian pyramid—there, the cold stone echoes, millennia later, the unrelenting concrete structure of László’s ‘pyramid’, with an esthetic as sterile and un-human as the tomb pyramids of Giza. One of the questions the film asks is how the two are related.  

THE FILM also examines the immigrant experience and the power imbalance existing between native born Americans who have wealth and privilege, and those, like László and his family, who are new Americans who struggle to realize their dreams and ambitions. We see him as he constructs his first large-scale project, working though his ideas of form and function to develop a new architectural style and ultimately a new school of architecture called “Brutalism”.

 

👉IT IS CLEAR IN THE FILM that German fascism, under which László and his wife, Erzsébet, suffered during the war, has its correspondence in America. And it's displayed in fine fashion by Guy Pierce in his role as the multi-millionaire Harrison van Buren, someone who wields great power and control over László but wears wingtip Oxfords instead of jackboots. After a party with the workers onsite at the growing community centre, Harrison rapes László who has no recourse but to bear the assault in silence or face losing the project he has spent years developing. Interestingly, it is Erzsébet who confronts van Buren during a family dinner calling him out as a “rapist”. Her accusation does not destroy László’s chances to complete the project, though delays occur amid turmoil within the van Buren family. 

 

Venice, Italy

 

 NEAR THE END of the movie, there is a scene where László is on a trip to Venice. There he rides in a gondola along the city’s famous canals. It is a magical, colourful, excursion amid the baroque and highly decorated buildings, and in stark contrast to the Brutalist buildings he would spend his life designing and building.

 

THE STORY MOVES FORWARD in time to the 1980’s with László, now an invalid and unable to speak, attending a retrospective of his work. His grand niece speaks for him, telling the audience that his work was inspired by his experience in the Buchenwald death camp. She says he deliberately removed any form, decoration or amenity from the building that suggested or celebrated community life. The bleakness of the death camps, their austere, unhuman, anti-life design and function he incorporated into his buildings to act as a reminder to the world of what happened and to lay down a marker for posterity, in a sense like the ancient pyramids of Egypt.

WHETHER OR NOT Brutalist architecture of the post-war era was indeed a concretization of one of the darkest periods in human history, it sure goes some way to explain that ‘someone just walked over my grave’ reaction you sometimes get when encountering such buildings. 

👉Brutalist architecture was a relatively short-lived phenomenon¹, and frankly, give me Venice any day!  

 

 

CHEERS, JAKE. _____________________________________

 

* The scene when László first arrives in America, passing beneath the statue of liberty at the entrance to New York harbour is an example of the camerawork found throughout the film: edgy and with a jazz sountrack. An ‘inverted’ statue of liberty suggests freedom is perhaps not as universal as advertised. 

1. Though I am told it is making something of a comeback of late. I'm not sure whether I'm happy with this news.  

  

The Ross Building, York University, circa 1970