Explanation for Everything (Magyarázat mindenre)

 Rarely does a contemporary film concerning politics present itself in such a novel and non-moralizing light. Furthermore, as one of its core tenets, the movie poignantly reveals the truly banal nature of  ostentatious political discourse. In a masterful display of editing, the main plot device to illuminate this issue is cleverly hidden from sight in numerous shots of quotidian life. Casually claustrophobic frames, multiple narrative arcs and realistic color grading remind us of our own lives all too well. The opening of the film displays a slowly growing shot of Hungarian high schoolers graduating, a clear indication of this motif of intensification. Abel, an aloof teenage boy, accidentally leaves on a pin with the Hungarian flag for his final oral exam. When pressured by his right-wing father, he blames for failing the exam due to unfair treatment vis-à-vis the political nature of the pin in an increasingly polarized nation. An ambitious reporter for a political magazine jumps at this story, eventually snowballing into a nationwide conflict. As this action occurs, the mysterious plot device becomes revealed: the character's own pre-existing insecurities. The film brilliantly portrays this in its crescendo - an argument between Abel's examiner (who happened to be his teacher) and his conservative father. After merely sitting in the same room for a few minutes, they begin a full-scale verbal political battle against each other, full of insults and yelling. The examiner projects his own insecurity of being wrong and the father projects his own insecurity of a lost way of life, order and history. The ingenuity of this film lies in hiding these very dominoes of political anxiety that are present in our day to day lives and exhibiting what occurs when the smallest one is knocked over. It ends with a final scene of Abel's idyllic and thoughtless summer - from banality we begin and to banality we return.