The Body Artist - Alejandrocasales.com

girls, or, as he puts it “pussy.” “Pénz és pina” or “money and pussy” is what everyone
– and there is no doubt about the film’s selective gendered address in this choice,
also posed to the viewers as a poll on the film’s website – ultimately needs in order
to be happy. Love will follow once you have the other two, according to Uncle Guszti.
While prostitutes are at least believable in a story about the eighth district, the
total absence of mothers is less easily explained. Single fathers are not a common
feature of Hungarian society in general, and particularly not of lower-class and immigrant
families. The filmmakers do not appear to consider it necessary to explain
where the mothers are. One suspects that mother characters would be an unnecessary
baggage in a social satire focused on ethnic strife and politics – a playing field
reserved for brothers and fathers.
From a gendered perspective, the film’s musical register is equally ambivalent.
While The District’s valorization of Roma rap undermines the nation-state’s ethnic hierarchy,
it fails to criticize the gendered hierarchy of state-sanctioned anti-communist
rock. In itself, this is not surprising, as it is characteristic of the very global trend on
which Roma rap draws. In this view, The District in particular and other popular forms
of Roma music in general never depart from “cock rock” of anti-communist rock movements.
The only female performers who contribute their musical talents to the film are
the sister rap-duo Ludditák (Luddites), two college students who carved out a loyal
underground following who appreciate their untranslatable, sarcastic language games,
often employed in the service of gendered, if not feminist, social critique. Their lyrics
offer a humorous and sophisticated critical mirror of transitional Hungary, with a sensitive
eye to the differences between urban and provincial transformations, reflecting
on their own transition from a small village to the capital. They are especially keen on
mocking pretentious masculine or macho attitudes, and rejecting the media-fabricated,
seductive body image doubly imposed on young women by an advertising-driven image
culture and local patriarchal tradition. For instance, their song “I’m so Pretty” announces
(in my own literal translation),
280 | Anikó Imre
You’re killing me by saying
I’m not pretty like Britney Spears
But your ideal won’t do it for me
I’m an MC girl, an MC girl.
You want a tip-top girl,
I want the hip-hop noise.
Your figure is like King Kong’s, man,
Your brain is like a ping-pong ball
Screw it, I won’t be ascetic because of you.
You dumped me like a rocket