The seventh seal that gave Ingmar Bergman’s film its title is the one whose opening is said to herald the seven angelic trumpeters and the seven bowls of divine wrath emptied out over the wretched sinners. This 1976 film from Hungarian director Zoltán Fábri, adapted from a novel by Ferenc Sánta, is named after something fractionally less dramatic: the fifth seal, whose opening reveals the martyrs’ prayers, beseeching God’s vengeance. Martyrdom, of a tragicomically compromised kind, is perhaps the film’s subject. It’s an arrestingly spiky political cabaret of cruelty and fear, recognisably from the same era of European cinema that brought us Pasolini’s Salò or Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe.
The person broodingly obsessed with the fifth seal is a miserable military veteran called Karoly (István Dégi), living in wartime Hungary during the reign of the quasi-Nazi leader Ferenc Szálasi. He has been wounded at the front and one night limps into a bar where four bleary boozers, who have evidently avoided service, cheerily welcome him to their table, perhaps uneasily aware that respect is due to his sacrifice; these are bar owner Béla (Ferenc Bencze), watchmaker Miklós (Lajos Öze), carpenter János (Sándor Horváth) and door-to-door salesman László (László Márkus). Kindly widower Miklós is hiding Jewish children in his apartment; Bela is having to bribe thuggish police Blackshirts to leave his bar alone; sleazy, seedy László is using hidden-market cuts of meat to get his mistress to sleep with him. Bizarre vignettes of the men’s private lives flash up, along with glimpses of Hieronymus Bosch imagery: secretive, furtive, erotic, grabbing desperately at pleasure before the imminent doom they all fear – either being taken away by their own police or executed by the incoming Soviet soldiers.
Then Miklós poses them all a hypothetical question as he recounts a fable of a cruel slave owner and his wretchedly abused slave on an imaginary island. If they were forced to choose, which would it be: the slave master or the slave, who at least has the supposed comfort of knowing that he is morally impeccable? Karoly insists he would choose slavery and is deeply offended when his new drinking buddies mockingly disbelieve him. But the question deeply discomfits all of them. It isn’t that it’s a false or meaningless opposition, a crass Sophie’s Choice of oppression, an objection that might otherwise be made. It’s that, deep down, they’ve already made their choice, or had it made for them. Could it be that they are both: slaves and complicit with the slave masters, like their Nazi-acquiescent rulers?
The whole issue becomes real when the police come to take them away on a tipoff that they have perhaps tactlessly brought on themselves. Is the fifth seal of martyrdom ever to be broken and even if it is, does it apply to them? This is a gloomy fable of disillusion and resignation, crowned by an extraordinary scene when one of the men, released (temporarily) from prison walks down a street which is collapsing under bombardment. It feels like an apocalypse of shame.
• The Fifth Seal is on Klassiki from 11 July.
