Pálfi's new film, his second following his debut Hukkle, tracks the lineage of one demented family tree that stretches from a disturbed soldier to his bastard son, an Olympic speed-eater, and finally to his reptilian taxidermist grandson. Within this framework, which breaks down into three 30-minute segments with nifty effects-laden transitions, the Hungarian filmmaker constructs a sort of alternative social history of his country, one that would arouse John Waters and summon applause from Monty Python.
The family's progenitor (Csaba Czene) doesn't last too long on the estate of his commanding officer. Though masturbating with little pause, he takes a moment to impregnate the portly wife of his host on a tub filled with pig entrails. The poor young soldier meets his end shortly after and never gazes upon his son, who is born with a pig's tail. The commanding officer quickly cuts it off and claims the child as his own.
Decades later, the boy has grown into Kalman (Gergely Trócsányi). We meet the corpulent young man as he is vying for first place in a speed-eating competition. The scene allows for the most memorable of Pálfi's gross-outs as his camera pulls a 360 around a vat where each of the competitors goes to vomit up everything from the last competition. Kalman passes out from a double-whammy of a heart attack and lockjaw, but the incident brings him closer with Gizi (Adél Stanczel), the women's speed-eating champion, whom he marries and (possibly) impregnates almost immediately.
The question of paternity is a minor part of Pálfi's freak show but also an interesting one. By implying that we don't know who we came from really, the director has diagnosed the entire species rather than just this family as carnivalesque. That would certainly help explain the disdain that older Kalman, who has grown to astronomical girth, shows for his son Lajoska (Marc Bischoff). Unable to do anything but feed himself, the older Kalman berates his son and forces him to help breed a race of speed-eating cats. When not dealing with his father, Lajoska toils alone as an expert taxidermist and finds himself contemplating experimental approaches to his art.
Like Lajoska, Pálfi's fascination with the body -- its daily excretions and emanations -- borders on obsession. The narration that concludes Pálfi's film rightly surmises that there are some things that simply cannot be fully expressed through art. Disgusting in the best way possible, Taxidermia recognizes that it cannot fully comprehend the revolting nature that humanity is capable of in both mind and body. What it does understand, however, is the surreal absurdity of those who want to understand it.
