Kornél Mundruczó is the Hungarian writer-director whose previously grim and resistible cinema - wispy parables of rural rape and abuse, as bare-boned as his sometime muse Orsi Tóth - took a giant leap forward after he relocated to the city for 2014's White God: here, at last, was a thriller to sink one's teeth into, possessed of both a big, bold, properly cinematic concept (a world overrun by vengeful packs of dogs) and the technique to make good on such a premise. For his follow-up, Mundruczó has reached even further out there. Jupiter's Moon adheres to one prominent arthouse trope of the present moment: it's another of our latter-day traveller's tales, opening up by tracking a young Syrian refugee, Aryan (Zsombor Jéger), as he crosses the border between Serbia and Hungary. Yet the film that follows turns out to be as close to a Marvel movie as Mundruczó is ever likely to make. After he's apparently shot dead by a patrolman, Aryan comes round to discover he has special powers, chiefly the ability to soar and swoop above his new home like Iron Man without the suit.
Now, you might say, this is an unusual if not altogether risky strategy for a serious filmmaker to adopt when addressing the migrant crisis: to abandon the harsh, boots-on-the-ground realities of such recent films as Human Flow and The Golden Dream in favour of pursuing literal flights of fantasy. It does, however, allow Mundruczó to swerve some of the pieties increasingly associated with this strain of cinema. As Aryan escapes a temporary holding camp and sets out for Budapest in a bid to reunite with the father he lost touch with at the border, his fate becomes intertwined with two men who indirectly represent different responses to this issue: a pragmatic doctor (Merab Ninidze), who becomes Aryan's unofficial manager, touring the lad around to perform miracles for cash; and a sour-faced detective (György Cserhalmi), who views Aryan as just another statistic to be rounded up and squared away. Scene after scene is elevated by Mundruczó's new-found big-picture technique. As in White God, the director - reunited with the earlier film's laudably flexible cinematographer Marcell Rév - stages long, very carefully choreographed takes through familiar-seeming metropolitan locations, while the flying scenes, achieved through a mix of analogue and digital wizardry, attain some of the elastic beauty of Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity.
Yet the setpieces in White God were very clear in both their execution and their meaning: these were the savage consequences of a dog-eat-dog world being turned upon its axis, so that dumb beasts should turn on Man, fangs bared. You will likely spend between 80-90% of Jupiter's Moon wondering just what exactly Mundruczó and his regular screenwriter Kata Wéber are attempting to communicate. When Aryan spins the house of an injured man who repeatedly spits the word "gypsy" at him, is the takehome that we should take better care of outsiders, because they possess both the power to heal us (as with the healthcare professionals who venture here from afar) and to destroy us (as with those radicalised on their travels)? Is that me being simplistic, or is it the movie? (Or is it the case that, given nationalists have traditionally appealed to the lowest common denominators, those on the Left would likewise do better to simplify - to address concerns about immigration in terms and images the man on the street might better understand?) The image rotates, and the mind boggles.
At any rate, there are signs the film gives in to a different kind of piety around its protagonist. Aryan, played by Jéger as a handsome blank, is identified at an early stage as the son of a carpenter, an occupation presumably chosen for its religious connotations, while the doctor joshingly refers to him as an angel - a reading Mundruczó later validates by having the lad ascend to the heavens, nursing what looks like a broken wing, in the wake of a midfilm subway bombing. Again, we're beset by questions: is Aryan a celestial being, sent among mortals to awaken something in the sceptical doctor, and just perhaps the jaded viewer? (The reviews following the film out of Cannes last summer suggest he'll have his work cut out for him.) Or is he something else, maybe: an embodiment or symbol of the spirit of free movement - hence all his balletic Tinkerbelling above the modern European metropolis?
I'm not sure even Mundruczó's certain, hence the scene late on in the back of a speeding ambulance where the doctor and the cop trade exactly those queries the audience will have been pondering for the duration. Though the film's own movements look to have been storyboarded down to the last small camera tilt, its ideas, admirable as they might seem, don't always seem to have been so closely thought through; the results, both kinetic and sketchy, come to resemble 2016's Midnight Special as made by someone with their head even further up in the clouds. It is true that Mundruczó has become a far more ambitious and accomplished imagemaker in recent years, and the cinema we find here is all the healthier for leaving the rape behind: one way or another, this director has landed firmly on the side of the angels. Yet somewhere amid all these spectacular twirls and humanist pirouettes, Mundruczó loses sight of one key fact: that the vast majority of the huddled masses headed our way are just regular Joes trying to get from there to here, bound by the same laws of physics as you or I, with nothing greater to raise them up than sheer force of will.
Jupiter's Moon is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema.
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