When this movie was released 5 years ago, it was celebrated in Hungarian media as a world-class movie that revolutionised Hungarian cinema, or something like that. So there was definitely a huge hype around it, but I didn't see it back then, only now, after it appeared on Netflix. I was expecting a movie with an original, maybe even deep story that is loosely connected to Japanese myhology. What I got instead was a plain, although admittedly stylish and funny comedy. It was very much riding the retro wave, as the setting is a version of 1970s Budapest, although in an alternate reality where it is a city in a capitalist country, a colorful place with Porsches, teleshops, Cosmopolitan magazine (a rather blunt product placement that's made part of the comedy, like the Tupperware coffin in the German 7 Dwarfs movie), an invented fast food chain, and silly clothes and hairstyles. Another part of the stylishness of the movie was the crazy music: one of the main characters of the movie is the ghost of an invented Japanese pop star who sings a typical Japanese-English language mix with a pretty authentic-sounding odd J-pop style music, although actually composed and sung by a Hungarian musician; and there's also some real Finnish western music by Marko Haavisto, who is strangely not credited; and Ievan polkka, which I haven't heard for like ten years.
This being a comedy, the essence of the movie are the gags. While there are all sorts of silly jokes (e.g. Liza prepares some idiotically disgusting dishes, like melon soup sprinkled with onions, for one of his "suitors" from a cookbook, wrapped in pink fur, which belonged to the deceased wife of the guy, and the guy calls Liza if he can call her by the name of the former wife), and in this respect this movie is in fact kind of similar to Jeunet's films, most of the jokes are the accidents themselves (not murders, like one of the reviewers claims) which afflict the men who desire Liza. This is a bit like the Final Destination movies, with the huge difference that the accidents there are really cleverly constructed and surprising, while those in this movie are very simple. Overall I'd say that the comedy is effective, I laughed out loud many times while watching the movie.
So having said all of these basically positive things, why am I giving Liza just 6 stars? Well, okay, it's funny and stylish, the acting is generally good enough, the story isn't too bad, but none of this is really astonishingly good either. All of it is just slightly better than average, which is by definition exactly a 6. It's a lame comedy like basically all the other successful Hungarian films of the past 30 years (the Koltai and the Üvegtigris movies, etc.). Watchable, but entirely unremarkable. Sorry about that.
Review of Liza the Fox-Fairy
