Then there is the aforementioned startling scene, where the townsfolk, for some unknown reason, riot and burn down the town, and then ravage the local hospital and beat patients, only to be stopped when they encounter a naked and emaciated old man in the shower. It’s a scene that hearkens back to the poetic ending of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, wherein Dave Bowman ages into fragility, but heightened because it follows after the terror (heightened by the silence of the victims) in the hospital, which is so reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s massacre on the Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin. Janos watches all of this, while hidden, and, like him, just when you think the naked old man is a goner, the violence stops, and the villagers leave the hospital, like creatures from a George Romero film. Perhaps this is because the old man never flinches, and his gaunt, almost Dachauvian appearance seems to have an effect on the mob, perhaps making them think on what the consequences of their actions can ultimately lead to.
As the film nears its end, Janos becomes obsessed with seeing the whale again, even as his uncle avoids it. Another ‘relative’ warns him that the mob from the hospital has him on their ‘list.’ Janos protests that he has done nothing wrong, but heeds her advice and tries to escape the town along the desolate railroad tracks. He is then spotted by a helicopter, and we next see him sitting on a hospital bed, in a stupor, as Eszter attends to him. This scene reminds one of another Kubrick film, A Clockwork Orange, except that Janos, unlike Little Alex, is likely to not recover any time soon, if at all.
Interestingly, he and Eszter seem to have gone in opposite arcs during the course of the film. Janos starts out full of life and ends up emotionally crushed and catatonic, whereas Eszter’s first appearance seems to portray him as near death (he cannot even retire for the night by himself), yet he ends the film with vigor and in full command of his faculties, even imploring Janos to recover. The film then ends with Eszter headed to the town square, where the stuffed whale sits, as the trailer has been dismantled. He walks slowly up to it, peers into its dead eye, then walks away, seemingly as unaffected by it as his nephew was affected. Of course, in a great work of art, such recapitulation, in another medium, cannot do justice to the work.
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