17/11/2022 - In Fanni Szilágyi’s playful and subtle debut feature film, Natasa Stork excels in a double role, playing twins who follow seemingly different social and personal paths

Two twins who are out of sync, with the same period of their lives placed under the microscope in two different chapters, ultimately painting the portrait of two women at the crossroads of their interwoven lives as thirty-somethings and shining a light on the different ways human beings have of seeing things… Displaying an array of mise en scène talent, based upon an incredibly refined screenplay penned by Zsófi Lányi, Hungarian director Fanni Szilágyi has signed her name to a highly promising debut feature film in the form of Not a Thing [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which was unveiled last month in New York Film Week, where Natasa Stork walked away with the thoroughly deserved prize of Best Actress for a double performance. The movie can be enjoyed as of today in Magyar cinemas where Mozinet is distributing the film.

Adèl and Éva are a complicated pair of twins, bound by a tight, biological and family link which is underpinned by guilt and poor communication. Because, as asked by a guest at the baptism reception of Éva’s first born child, which Adèl turns up to very late, soaked through from the rain and removing her socks in order to hide the holes in them: "why is it ok if it’s shitty for me?". Indeed, the outrageous materialism of housewife Éva and her businessman husband Tamás (Máté Szabó), with their villa overlooking the town, their top-of-the-range fitness equipment, their carpet which cost the same as a car, their vegan meals, their eco-friendly nappies, etc., is completely at odds with the daily hospital life experienced by single radiologist Adèl, who spends her nights playing in an online heroic fantasy quest world. But then Adèl finds a job abroad in Norway. She gets ready to leave, whilst also embarking on an affair with Àkos (Márton Patkós), a crane operator employed by Tamás. This sentimental shuffling of the decks injects trouble and opacity into the two sisters’ relationship, just as a total change of perspective takes place: the film’s viewpoint switches to Éva’s and subsequently revisits all of the film’s previous events from her perspective, which results in more than a handful of surprises… Neither Éva nor Àdel are what we thought at first glance.

This game of mirrors crafted with formidable narrative and editing skill, this fermentation in a small space which is explored whilst also expanding the field of observation around the subject of love and the dominion-freedom binomial, is enveloped in a highly refined mise en scène (involving very fluid and agile camera work by director of photography Gabor Szilágyi), which is rich in a multitude of tiny visual and symbolic details which are cleverly and subtly peppered throughout the film. It’s an incredibly interesting entrance into the world of feature films for Fanni Szilágyi, who transposes a very formal yet playful corpus on paper into a double-barrelled, realist, feminist work. Now we just need to wait, curious for the filmmaker’s next feature-length movie, not to mention the next acting performance by the brilliant Natasa Stork, whom we already saw at her best in Venice 2020 in Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lili Horvat
interview: Natasa Stork
film profile] and who was also the European Film Promotion’s Shooting Star in 2021. The Hungarian film industry clearly hides some talented individuals with great futures ahead of them, both in front of and behind its cameras.

Not a Thing is produced by Partnersfilm in co-production with Visionteam, and is sold worldwide by NFI World Sales.

(Translated from French)