TThe Seventh Seal, the title of Ingmar Bergman’s film, is said to herald the opening of seven angels blowing trumpets and pouring out seven bowls of God’s wrath on poor sinners. Hungarian director Zoltán Fabry’s 1976 film is an adaptation of Ferenc Santha’s novel, after which it takes its name, but in a less dramatic way. The Fifth SealThe film opens with a scene of martyrs praying and pleading for divine vengeance; tragically compromised martyrdom is perhaps the film’s theme. It’s a arrestingly poignant political cabaret of cruelty and terror that identifies it with the same era of European cinema as Pasolini’s Salò and Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe.
The character obsessed with the Fifth Seal is Karoly (Istvan Degi), a miserable veteran living under the Tsar’s rule during Hungary’s wartime years. Ferenc Szalász, the semi-Nazi leaderWounded at the front, he limps into a bar one night, where four sleepy drinkers, who have apparently avoided service, cheerfully welcome him to their table, perhaps anxious to pay tribute to his sacrifice: the bar’s owner, Béla (Bence Ferenc), the watchmaker Miklós (Eze Lajos), the carpenter János (Horvát Sándor), and the door-to-door salesman László (Markus László). Miklós, a kind-hearted widower, hides Jewish children in his apartment; Béla has to bribe the violent Blackshirt police to keep them away from her bar; the sleazy, scruffy László is trying to seduce his mistress with meat sold on the black market. Strange scenes from the men’s private lives emerge, as well as images from Hieronymus Bosch. Secretive, furtive, erotic, they all desperately seek pleasure before the impending doom they fear – either being taken away by their own police or executed by approaching Soviet soldiers.
Miklós then poses a hypothetical question to them all, telling them a fable about a cruel slaveowner and his horribly abused slaves on a fictional island: if they were forced to choose, which would they choose? The slaveowner, or the slave who at least has the security of knowing he is morally above reproach? Karoli insists that he would choose the slave, and is enraged when his new drinking companions mockingly disbelieve him. But the question deeply perplexes them all. Not because it is a false or meaningless opposition, a crude Sophie’s Choice against oppression, an opposition that might have been made otherwise; but because, deep down, they have already made a choice, or been forced to make one. Are they both slaves, and are they both complicit with the slaveowner, like their masters, subservient to the Nazis?
The question becomes real when the police turn up to arrest them, presumably on a tip-off they had callously brought upon themselves. Can the fifth seal of martyrdom ever be broken, and if so, does it apply to them? It’s a dark fable of disillusionment and resignation, culminating in a startling scene in which one of the men, having been (temporarily) released from prison, walks through a bombed-out and crumbling street. It’s like an apocalypse of shame.
