Symphony No. 42
2013 · 9m · Hongrie
Directed by Reka Bucsi
Genres: comedy, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Across 47 surreal vignettes, humans and animals collide in absurd everyday situations — perplexed foxes, imprisoned elephants, balloon cowboys — exposing the irrational coherence of the world around us.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Bucsi's refusal to let any single logic govern 47 consecutive vignettes is exactly the kind of structural sabotage that makes other programmers nervous—and makes this feel genuinely alive. A film that treats coherence as the enemy of truth.
The surrealist lineage here traces cleanly back through Švankmajer and the Prague school, but Bucsi's editing strategy—treating each collision as a discrete formal problem rather than a joke setup—grounds the abstraction in something austere and considered.
The decision to repeat the same deadpan human reaction across wildly different absurdist premises is what cracks it open; it's a tiny structural inversion that transforms surrealism from aesthetic choice into genuine philosophical statement about how we process the irrational.
Reviews
L'occasion de retrouver ses nombreuses vignettes cocasses et colorées sur l'homme, l'animal, la nature et l'absurdité du monde qui les entourent. Du renard perplexe à l'éléphant emprisonné, des cow-boys à ballons à la liseuse de bonne aventure, Réka Bucsi ne lâche rien, le temps d'un film d'école, bouclant sa boucle et laissant une poignée de mystère, de finesse et d'humour derrière elle.