Kontroll
To paraphrase the old Petula Clark hit: Don't sleep in the subway, darling, or the ticket punchers will beat you to a pulp.
''Kontroll," the first feature by the Hungarian writer-director Nimrod Antal, takes your angriest thoughts about urban public transportation and magnifies them into a grubby and rousingly antisocial fantasia on post-communist breakdown and bureaucracy. It's an underground movie in the most literal sense: The characters never come up for air.
If you didn't know that the Budapest subway system is the second-oldest in the world (after London's), you'll believe it minutes into ''Kontroll." The movie posits that the only way order can be maintained is for five-man crews of ticket inspectors to patrol the various lines. In theory, they're civic functionaries; in practice, they're gangs shaking down the passengers for whatever they can get. Since the passengers are often tougher than they are, the inspectors don't get much.
The film focuses on the least impressive of the crews, a gaggle of misfits overseen by the Professor (Zoltan Mucsi), who has seen it all and no longer gives a damn.
The youngest member is Tibor (Zsolt Nagy), apparently a skinhead who has decided to find some purpose in life; the most hotheaded, Muki (Csaba Pindroch), doubles as the dumbest, and his narcolepsy gets in the way at the worst times. Watching these losers work a subway car of aggravated commuters is fine low comedy.
The most capable of the group, for reasons that aren't initially clear, is the 20-something Bulcsu (Sandor Csanyi). Thoughtful, good-looking, possibly even educated, Bulcsu can still dish out a beating with the best of them. Unlike his colleagues, he lives in the subway system full time, sleeping on benches and never heading up the long escalators into daylight. A random encounter with an old mentor from above provides the briefest of glimpses into the young man's discontents.
''Kontroll" could easily be a trenchant allegory for modern Eastern Europe if its director wanted to go that way. But Antal is seduced by his ragged characters and their daily existential farce; he just sets up his clockwork universe and watches it noisily grind down. There are beguiling characters and plotlines -- the crew is always chasing after a jeering graffiti kid named Bootsie (Bence Matyasi); Bulcsu dares another inspector (Balazs Mihalyfi) to chicken-run down a tunnel in front of the midnight express; a dark, hooded figure is stalking the late-night platforms pushing travelers under the wheels of trains.
These pieces come together, but they don't always fit. Is the hooded figure real? Metaphorical? The hero's alter ego? All of the above? What should be ambiguous merely seems confused.
Eventually, ''Kontroll" lets its sentimental side show, not that that's a bad thing. Bulcsu meets and is instantly smitten -- as are we -- by a young woman named Szofi, played with what can only be called adorable intelligence by Eszter Balla. Szofi travels the subway system wearing a frayed flannel bear costume, presumably because for her the rave will never end and life is to be embraced. Or maybe it's just because the actress looks cute in a bear suit.
At other times, the movie veers into a cynicism that is poorly disguised as comedy -- a common disease of young directors. The scene in which the ticket inspectors undergo their annual psychiatric exam is funny but ultimately too derisive to sting. Bulcsu's malaise, meanwhile, is more ordinary than Antal may think. Holden Caulfield would feel very much at home in these tunnels. But he probably wouldn't last a day.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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