Dealer 2004

In portraying a day in the life of a drug dealer, this remarkable second feature from young Hungarian filmmaker Benedek Fliegauf seems almost single-mindedly intent on dragging its audience into a hazy drug-induced world of queasiness and paranoia. Dealer feels more like a seance than the usual clichéd trip into the harsh realities of the drug trade. We witness a string of increasingly odd and baroque encounters between the eponymous dealer and the people who surround him: the comatose leader of a religious sect, a drug-dependent solo mother, his grieving and deranged father… the glimmer of hope is a young girl who may or may not be his daughter. Sickly and drained of life, these people, with few exceptions, are truly the waking dead. With its long, slow-burning takes which completely encircle the actors, and hauntingly rhythmic background noises (strange and disturbing chanting, devilish television babble, a cat’s purr which vibrates through the theatre), the film’s mise en scène is completely otherworldly. — MM