Taxidermia is a surrealistic journey into dark comedy. It tells the stories of three generations: Vendel, a Hungarian soldier during World War II; his son Kálmán, a competitive eater during the Cold War period; and Kálmán's son Lajos, a taxidermist living in the current day. Each is living a life without fulfillment. They have a taste of what life can be, but it is always incomplete.

Vendel is an orderly for a lieutenant. The rest of the army is nowhere to be seen—that it part of the unreality of the whole film. While the lieutenant has a family and home, Vendel lives in a little shed and enjoys life as a peeping tom. His is a world of masturbation—to the point of flames shooting out of his penis. He craves love, but is such an outsider—almost a non-entity—that he can never create any kind of bond. This section of the film has lots of images that bring the senses to mind—light and dark, heat and cold, sexual scenes. There is a passion in his life, but no way, other than self-gratification (often humorously portrayed) for that passion to find any outlet.

Kálmán is in training as a competitive eater. Here is a farcical look at the Communist athletic programs of the day. He is expected to focus completely on this "sport." He falls in love with a female competitive eater, but can he keep up his training and start a family at the same time? Kálmán's life is outwardly fulfilling (and very filling), but it is obviously transitory without real passion. After each round of an eating competition, the participants stand at a trough and regurgitate everything (and they can regurgitate quite a lot). Eating has no enjoyment, or even nutrition—it is merely a challenge to be skillfully accomplished.

Lajos is a master taxidermist and is taking care of his father who is now a very large, immobile blob who is trying to train cats at competitive eating. There isn't much in Lajos's life outside of his shop. He wants something more than what is in his life, so he makes what might be the ultimate piece of taxidermy art: he stuffs his own torso. In this he achieves a bit of immortality—but it is immortality without life.

Director György Pálfi wrote, "My aim was to create not just an auteur film, but an enduring, personal auteur film." Such films will appeal to some people but certainly not to a broad audience. I expect Taxidermia will have viewers who find the bizarre and grotesque world of the film quite interesting and others who just won't get into it.

The first two stories are based on writings of Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy. Nagy's writings are minimally available in the U.S., but the tone of the stories reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges.

Throughout the film there are some recurring images. The images are at once both surreal and naturalistic. The most interesting are scenes of disembowelment—first of a pig, then the figurative disembowelment of the eaters' extensive vomiting, and finally watching Lajos lovingly remove his own organs. Life, it seems, is a process of metaphorical evisceration.

All of this is done with a very dark humor—the kind of dark humor that often shows up in films from Eastern Europe. I think it may be hard for us to really get that humor. Certainly as I watched I could see the humor in what was happening, but I always felt that there was something about it I wasn't quite getting. I had the same sense when watching the Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Perhaps those decades of repressive regimes are necessary to fully appreciate how comical the collapse of one's life can be.