Johanna Movie Review:


“Johanna,” a new Hungarian movie from Kornél Mundruczó, opens with grim, washed-out tracking shots of a doctor walking round a hospital in what
appears to be the wake of some disaster. He stops suddenly when he sees a curious-looking, attractive girl. She lifts up her top, almost seductively,
to reveal that her chest is covered in blood. The doctor lifts her up and takes her to the hospital ward.

And then someone starts singing. It is explained, in song, that the apparent chaos in the hospital was just an emergency drill, with stand-ins as patients. “Johanna,” you see, is an opera, with an entirely original score written by Zsófia Tallér. It’s an unusual approach, which I wish were used in more interesting material. “Johanna” tells a rather dull, not to mention depressing, martyr story without the necessary development to make us care about the characters, or see ourselves in them.

The girl, Johanna, turns out to be a drug addict, who steals morphine from the hospital. Someone spots her doing it. ‘Who are you?’ he sings. ‘I am me,’ she sings back. Uh, huh. She is found unconscious by the doctor who first spotted her (played by Dénis Gulyás), recovers, and is trained as a nurse. With the exception of the doctor, who is either in love or lust with her, the staff at the hospital doesn’t much like Johanna. It probably doesn’t help that she sleeps with the patients (yes, while singing). She
does this because she thinks it will cure the patients, and, what do you know, it does. The man with cirrhosis no longer needs a transplant, and
another no longer needs his pacemaker, which shows you the true way to a man’s heart. On finding out what she has done, the hospital staff hunts her down because she has broken the rules.

I don’t have any problems with the melodramatic plot turns; opera is not the medium for subtlety. But I never believed in Johanna as a person with
real problems. Orsolya Tóth is well cast in the role – she has the ability to make us believe plot details that would otherwise cause us to titter –
yet the character never rises above being a wide-eyed innocent in a big scary place. She’s a Jesus character, but, as Martin Scorsese showed in
“The Last Temptation of Christ,” the point of the Jesus story is that he was both man and God. Johanna is essentially just a saint, and, as such, not a very interesting character; how are we expected to relate to someone who awakens from being a drug addict, and turns into someone without flaws, with only love?

That question may make “Johanna” sound cheery and kitschy, but it isn’t. Kitsch might have been preferable. It’s not a worthless movie; it has some
interesting camera work, although this is distracted from by the almost fatal decision to have white subtitles in a movie with largely white backgrounds; I found myself constantly squinting to make them out. The film ends on a note of hopelessness, and although I admired the haunting image at the end, I left the cinema wondering why anybody would want to see such a depressing – and ultimately empty – movie.

Adam Whyte

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