Two Girls on the Street (André de Toth, 1939) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Imperial Hean

First things first: I am woefully under-informed about de Toth as a filmmaker. This is only the second film of his I've seen, the other one being his 3D House of Wax. So I have a lot of catching up to do, and I can't really say how this early entry fits into his career. But taken on its own terms, Two Girls on the Street is formally and ideologically fascinating, a film bending itself into pretzels trying to express anxieties and emotions that exceed language, while going way out of its way to avert certain other, verboten conclusions.

The film hits the ground running. Gyöngyi (Maria von Tasnady) disrupts her lover's wedding rehearsal dinner to announce that the groom already knocked her up. Her father disowns her, and she is cast out onto the mean streets of Budapest. By chance, she meets Vica (Bella Bordy), a slightly younger and more naive woman who's working at a construction site. She's also homeless, and is even forbidden to sleep on the worksite once she rebuffs an attempted rape by the building's architect Cicztár (Andor Ajtay). The pair team up, eking out a living, until Vica contacts Gyöngyi's father to inform him of their conditions. He then gives them a substantial monthly allowance, permitting them to move into the very same building Vica had been working on.

To all appearances, Two Girls on the Street seems like it's a muted but effective feminist statement on sisterhood and self-reliance. But about midway through, de Toth makes a hairpin turn, as we discover that the rapist architect lives in the building too, and he has taken a shine to Vica, who seems strangely familiar to him but who he just can't place. Vica should've said something like "bend my arms back, pin me down, and see if you don't recognize me." Alas, both women fall in love with this revolting cad, and their friendship is destroyed by lies and even a suicide attempt.

Through all of this, de Toth employs radical film techniques more commonly seen in silent films. (No surprise, considering the date.) An early montage shows the people from Gyöngyi's town learning about her perfidy, with clips of people whispering to each other superimposed over a tolling church bell. At several points, salient objects, such as a pile of money or a bridge Vica's considering jumping from, are subjected to Cubist fragmentation of the sort one sees in far bolder films like Ménilmontant or Ballet mécanique. In fact, as the film's plot becomes intolerably reactionary, de Toth's technique becomes more and more unhinged.

In their classic and controversial text on Young Mr. Lincoln, the editors of Cahiers du cinéma focused on exploring the mechanisms by which Ford's film worked overtime to repress the unsayable, paradoxically making those gaps speak all the louder. Two Girls on the Street seems narratively shoddy, but de Toth's avant-garde flourishes show him to be in complete control of the medium. So, when Gyöngyi avoids a miserable fate by somehow becoming a virtuoso violinist in the film's final minutes, it feels less like a compromise than a middle-finger to audiences (and, no doubt, producers) who demanded a happy ending for all.

But it's more than this. Early in the film, Gyöngyi's pregnancy ends in a full-term stillbirth. This trauma, we are meant to believe, completely codes her psychology as maternal, such that we tacitly understand that, even though she is educated and more worldly, she is not the appropriate match for Cicztár. But even before he reappears, Vica poses the question. "Why are you being so nice to me?" As this luckless former aristocrat takes the naive country girl under her wing, we are told she sees Vica as her "20-year-old daughter," for whom she wants the best possible outcome. This suggestion, that a woman under 30 would focus her material instincts onto a total stranger just a few years younger than herself, is so bizarre as to be transparently false. Gyöngyi is attracted to Vica, and de Toth must move heaven and earth, plausibility and even basic decency, to short-circuit that obvious conclusion. In strictly Freudian terms, Two Girls on the Street is a hysterical film, bursting with visual information while shooing us away: "nothing to see here."