In the Flesh: The Brutalist

“Is there a better description of a cube than its own construction?” asks László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in one of his first conversations with his mercurial, selfish soon-to-be patron, the millionaire businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pierce). It’s a haunting thought. When in the film’s final moments we learn that László’s masterpiece, the Van Buren Institute, was built to mirror Dachau, the concentration camp László survived during the war, we find it echoed on an epic scale. What could express the horror of having come through such a crucible better than to recreate it, and to pierce it through its metaphorical breast with a single note of beauty and freedom. That it bears the family name of László’s rapist is a cruel reminder that even memory still has venom in its fangs, and that the devil’s bargain of making art under capitalism is to be subject to and preyed upon by its parasitic elites.

Director Brady Corbet stages very little indifferently. His interiors are meticulously blocked so that each element contributes to the complexity and meaning of the shot, as when Van Buren’s assistant wakes a groggy László for work and the bare confines and narrow doorways of the guest house chop their conversation into a disorienting, impersonal rush symbolic of the cultural disconnect between the two men. His exteriors are clean and instantly iconic, from the early shot of Harrison leading his dinner guests up a backlit hillside to the staggering interior-exterior shots in a partially abandoned Italian quarry. He does not embellish with aftereffects or the realism of shaky cam or immersive one-shot sequences, but, like László, allows the form to speak for itself. It’s a tremendously confident approach, and it pays real dividends, creating a painterly but never quaint or mannered aesthetic.

Brody is excellent as László, a self-loathing and unpleasant knot of a man driven by constant dissatisfaction with the world around him. When he’s finally reunited with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) after being separated during the Holocaust, he refuses to acknowledge her disability and his repulsion at it until she forces the issue in bed. “I love you, you cow,” he finally snaps. Their thorny relationship, his inability to let her into his thoughts or feelings, her tearful frustration at his obsession with work even at the cost of his relationships and sanity, form the film’s unsteady heart. It’s Jones, though, who really surprises. She has real depth in her performance, a battered but not embittered need to be seen and loved, to be fucked, to be talked to, that transcends any tired “unhappy wife of awesome guy” caricature, and a spine of steel to go with it. László is a slave to his own impulse to create, unable even to confront his attacker out of shame and fear of losing his patronage, but for Erzsébet marching into the home of a millionaire on a walker she’s just learned to use and calling him a rapist in front of his family and guests is a matter of course. 

The deep sensitivity with which the film handles László’s sexual assault and subsequent breakdown are the markers of its thoughtful construction. Harrison and his ilk, even before the fateful scene, are shot like vampires, bloodless and aristocratic, dead in the eyes, often isolated and captured in subtle slow-motion in the midst of laughter or everyday acts. But Harrison is no movie monster, and when confronted, he simply vanishes into the night, fleeing out of shame and an inability to reconcile his repressed desires and predatory nature with the image he maintains in polite society. László and Erzsébet may spend the rest of their lives in pain, may trade one bigoted hellhole (America) for another (Israel) in their quest to escape persecution, but that existence is in itself an act of remembrance and of defiance. Having lost so much and suffered such horrors, they can still make their own imperfect, often hard to look at mark on the world, while a man as advantaged and powerful as Harrison simply blows away like milkweed at the first breath of wind.