The Brutalist
Something about the trailer caught my interest. Was it the story of the man László Toth who brought brutalist architecture to the world? Well, that may have been the story and the hook-in. However, it was co-directors Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold's fascination, among other things, with Brutalist architecture that inspired the story. When partners co-write a screenplay, it’s difficult to know who brought what to the story.
I read their interview with scriptmag.com and still found it difficult to judge which one said, “Let’s use brutalism to tell this story.”
Both of them had architects in the family, Mona’s grandfather and Brady’s uncle. In the interview, Corbet says,
“Brutalism, for me, felt like the correct visual allegory for exploring post-war trauma because it is a style of post-war architecture that came about in the 1950s and feels very much in dialogue with the previous period of the two World Wars.”
László Toth (Adrien Brody), the central character in the film, survives the Holocaust and leaves Hungary for America. ‘America’, just the word, is a symbol to many of new life and a prosperous one. He leaves behind not only Hungary but also his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who he had become separated from during the war.
It is the immigrant’s story, although this immigrant is leaving due to and with the trauma of the Holocaust.
Toth wants the world to remember the concentration camps and designs buildings based on them to be that memory.
‘The Hungarian Conservative’ (link below) speculates that Toth is an amalgam of Hungarian-Jewish architects Marcel Lajos Breuer and Ernő Goldfinger.
The Jewish influence is likely from Corbet, whose mother was Jewish.
The film lasts 3 hours 35 minutes. An intermission halfway through added to the experience, particularly in an Art Deco cinema built in 1908.
This film was about the journey of a man from cycles of brokenness to recovery. He leaves Hungary to rebuild his life. He is dependent on others to help him with that and often experiences the brunt of that individual’s emotions.
He initially works for a relative, during which time he is commissioned to build a library for Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce). They are not paid for the work, although sometime later his work finds its way to design magazines. Van Buren seeks him out to design a community centre to honour his recently deceased mother. The focus of the film is the design and the building of the community centre; the drama is around relationships between Van Buren and Toth and between Toth and his wife and niece, who join him in America.
One of the most shocking scenes is the rape of Toth. If brutalism showed the trauma of the Holocaust, Toth's aggression showed living with the trauma of the rape.
This film is about surviving, surviving a genocide and then surviving a sexual violation and how the traumas work their way out in our lives, both in what we produce and how we behave.
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