TThe seventh seal, from which Ingmar Bergman’s film takes its title, is said to be opened when seven angels blow their trumpets, heralding the pouring out of seven bowls of God’s wrath upon wretched sinners. Hungarian director Zoltán Fabry’s 1976 film, adapted from Ferenc Sant’s novel, takes its name from the less dramatic fifth seal, which, when opened, reveals a prayer in which martyrs plead for God’s vengeance. Martyrdom, tragically compromised, may be the subject of the film. It is a poignant and arresting political cabaret of cruelty and terror, clearly from the same era of European cinema as Pasolini’s Salò and Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe.
The man who is deeply obsessed with the Fifth Seal is Karoly (Degi István), a wretched veteran living in wartime Hungary under the quasi-Nazi leader Ferenc Szalássy. Wounded at the front, he limps into a bar one night, where four absent-minded drinkers, who have clearly been avoiding service, cheerfully welcome him to their table, perhaps feeling anxiously that they should honour his sacrifice. They are the bar’s owner, Béla (Bence Ferenc), the watchmaker Miklós (Eze Lajos), the carpenter János (Horváth Sándor), and the door-to-door salesman László (Markus László). Miklós, a kind-hearted widower, hides Jewish children in his apartment. Béla has to bribe the vicious Blackshirt police to keep them away from the bar. The sleazy and sleazy László is trying to seduce his mistress with black market meat. Strange scenes from the men’s private lives emerge, bringing to mind images by Hieronymus Bosch: secretive, furtive, erotic, desperate to grasp at pleasure before the impending doom they all fear: either being taken away by their own police or executed by approaching Soviet soldiers.
Miklós then poses a hypothetical question to them all, telling them a fable about a cruel slaveowner and his horribly abused slaves on a fictional island: if they were forced to choose, which would they choose? The slaveowner, or the slave who at least has the security of knowing he is morally above reproach? Karoli insists that he would choose the slave, and is enraged when his new drinking companions mockingly disbelieve him. But the question deeply perplexes them all. Not because it is a false or meaningless opposition, a crude Sophie’s Choice against oppression, an opposition that might have been made otherwise; but because, deep down, they have already made a choice, or been forced to make one. Are they both slaves, and are they both complicit with the slaveowner, like their masters, subservient to the Nazis?
The question becomes real when the police turn up to arrest them, presumably on a tip-off they had callously brought upon themselves. Can the fifth seal of martyrdom ever be broken, and if so, does it apply to them? It’s a dark fable of disillusionment and resignation, culminating in a startling scene in which one of the men, having been (temporarily) released from prison, walks through a bombed-out and crumbling street. It’s like an apocalypse of shame.
