Review (#2): "Lajko: Gipsy in Space", a Movie Directed by Balázs Lengyel (2018)

By Péter MARTON

This is a moderately spoilered review of the Hungarian movie "Lajkó: Cigány az űrben" (in our own translation: Lajko: Gipsy in Space). Head to the cinemas first if you would like to form your own opinion of it, before reading a critical evaluation like this. And in the meantime, spend a last second marvelling at the art on the packaging of my favourite Russian chocolate ("Cosmic Odyssey") above, which is only loosely related, as illustration, to the subject of this post.

Still here? Then let's talk, firstly, about key terms – because some people may be hesitant to watch this film upon encountering its title. Some think that "Gipsy" as a term is offensive, and perhaps "Roma" should be preferred as an alternative. What one then needs to realise is that there is nothing inherently offensive about the word Gipsy, and yet neither of the above terms is really fully appropriate. At different points in time, they were either invented or selected, from what were only seemingly appropriate options, largely by non-Gipsies/non-Romas, to describe an in fact diverse population group that they wanted to identify with these labels (so these are wholly or partly "exonyms" as such). And while the word Gipsy is often uttered by people who are racist as a derogatory term, there is nothing stopping the same people from using the word Roma in a similar way. So why should one give them a monopoly over defining the meaning of either of these terms?

With that out of the way, the next critical issue is the genre. Is this SF? No. "Lajko" is most often described as black comedy. However, in our evaluation it may also be regarded as "alternative history" – it thus belongs on our agenda and may be legitimately evaluated against the standards usually applied in the case of such works.

As an alternative history piece, it has counterfactual propositions in its focus. The plot is built on these. They are, mostly, not entirely implausible, and at the same time they are interesting – which is to say the movie is legit in a basic way. The Soviet Union certainly didn't have much transparency – I was meaning to say: glasnost – around and about its decision-making and policies in the 1950s, to put it (extremely) mildly. Could men have been lost (even sacrificed) in the course of the early phase of the Soviet space program without the public ever learning about this? Of course. Soviet leaders made people who were not to be remembered disappear from photos per standard operation, after all. They also kept the space dog Layka's terrible death a secret. Or think of how slow they were to acknowledge that something's gone wrong in Chernobyl, in April 1986. So there is a lot of speculation about this, anyway. The film's concept stems right from here. Instead of a dog named Layka, it could as well have been a Hungarian Roma person, by the name of Lajkó, to get to space as the first human being (in Russian, "Layka" and "Lajko" would be pronounced almost the same). Moreover, the Soviet Union often found reasons and ways to sacrifice people whom it found expendable or unwanted, throughout most if its history. This could as well have been part of a systematic program using such people from Eastern Europe, from Estonian Forest Brothers to Hitlerjugend PoWs and to... Lajkó.

These are the central counterfactual propositions, and the film withstands the basic plausibility test regarding them. But there is one more counterfactual thread that's not central but key in a way: the one presenting Brezhnev as gay. The plausibility of this cannot be meaningfully addressed, but there are all those memories of the Soviet "fraternal kiss," of course. See how the latter is documented even on an election campaign poster of the Hungarian Fidesz party from 1990, the time of the first free parliamentary elections in Hungary. Yes, it's Brezhnev on the left (top left, that is). The poster's main message to voters at the time was: "Choose, please!" By this they implied (primarily) that instead of the old Soviet order imposed on Hungary, they were offering the love and idealism of the young people they (Fidesz) used to be back then, for the sake of the young Hungarian democracy.

So the roots of this are kinda there, giving a creative license to the makers of the film – hopefully not to make fun of this per se.

Problems begin, ironically, when we evaluate the movie as a black comedy. Critics note influences of Kaurismäki and Wes Anderson in various aspects of the film. Characters get to say the weirdest things with the seriousness everyday people often speak absurdities with, too. There's nothing wrong with this concept, it's the execution that's the problem. The plot could have used more humour as well as more madness. And less of the to-the-hell-with-the-details silliness with which the story was woven from point A to B. Details shouldn't matter too much, but they do matter somewhat. Suspending disbelief is hard when a direct train from Hungary takes the main actors to the middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan, where they then have to walk in tall grass to be escorted to the premises of the space centre by a lone sniper who ambushes them not knowing who they are.

The Soviet program certainly wasn't exactly like the U.S. program. But if the Soviets wouldn't have been very organised, and most often precise as well, they would have never pulled off anything in space. One of the film's best jokes is about the inventiveness of Soviet engineers – Gagarin tells Lajko, who was already a space enthusiast as a child, that "your childhood sketches of a fertiliser drive surprised even the Soviet engineers." But being inventive is not exactly the same thing as clowning around, and, more importantly from the perspective of film-making, telling a joke like this may work quite well in a film even as showing the Soviet space program to have been amateurish and disorganised doesn't work very well at all. Not even for the fun of it – because we know of the Soviet program's real, actual results.

Finally, there is our protagonist, Lajkó. The director, Balázs Lengyel, mentions in an interview with Origo that "the positive and negative stereotypes associated with Gipsy people were a good fit" for the kind of protagonist that was needed in the story. While the film treats its Roma characters generally positively, stereotyping is usually a lowering of one's standards. In some contexts this may get a pass. But it probably shouldn't, in the context of a society with major horizontal inequalities (such as Hungary's), where a film-maker from majority society makes a film mostly for the members of majority society about a disadvantaged minority protagonist.

In my humble opinion, a Roma protagonist would have been more acceptable if more research would have gone into building plausible, flesh-and-blood characters, and more of an effort would have been invested into presenting to audiences the general state of majority-minority relations at the time. The result is less than satisfying. Lajkó's figure is not very plausible at all – and his father is built completely from stereotypes. Something that could have compensated for this in a very important way (but was not given a chance to do so) is the language. The characters don't use particularly colourful language, let alone Lovari/Romani expressions much.

That said, to finish on a more positive note: the film has some good visual and sound effects, and some of the costumes looked pretty good, too (see a picture from the film below). And we did genuinely laugh a couple of times.

Previously reviewed here: "A House of Her Own" by Bo Balder, Escape Pod, 2017