THE film The Brutalist (Cert. 18) provokes deep questions, not particularly about architecture. After the Second World War’s ruinous efforts to defeat evil, unadorned buildings proclaimed, naïvely perhaps, a belief in honesty and simplicity. Future attitudes are signalled by the movie’s fictional hero, László Toth (Adrien Brody), who, having survived the Holocaust, sails to New York.
As he emerges from below deck, it looks as if the Statue of Liberty has been turned on its head. Old values offering the tired, poor, and huddled masses freedom are now endangered. After several arduous years’ labouring in Pennsylvania, Toth gets employed by the wealthy and mercurial Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce in full throttle). The brief is to design “a sacred enough space for a community of learning”, one including a Christian chapel.
The Jewish Toth devises a roof light in the shape of a cross, which, at certain times of the day, will reflect on to the altar below. Harrison is both a kindly soul, arranging for László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), trapped in Hungary to join him. But Toth is also made to feel the weight of Protestant authority when he is told “We tolerate you.” It is clear that the American Dream is only ever attainable by some, whether it is the 1940s and ’50s, in which the film is set, or now.
Outbursts apart, László leads a life of quiet desperation. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, he chants the Al Chet prayer, which asks God to forgive not just our own failings, but the sins of the whole world. The film, at one level, is a lament for what has been lost in the name of progress, the real brutalists being those whose business practices alienate whole societies. In reaction, László’s constructions often replicate his Buchenwald cell while beseeching inhabitants to look up towards streaming shafts of light in the hope that they rekindle Judaeo-Christian values.
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