Áron Török’s short film ‘Hanna’s Bistro’ reimagines a world where everything starts from scratch. Hanna believes she is the last person on earth, so she tries to reinvent the world in her own way. Hanna sees the new world she has on her hands as a perfect place to begin the reconstruction under her terms, and what’s a better starting point other than a bistro? Hanna prepares a décor suitable for the last remaining people on earth to find comfort and a new beginning in her lounge. She takes it as an essential task to create the perfect place where the remaining of humanity should meet and find another way.
Three elements make ‘Hanna’s Bistro’ shine in our eyes. First of all, we love how Áron Török thought out the script of this short. Hanna’s monologue is enticing, to say the least; many times when a director goes for a movie like this one, the poetic level of the script is exceptionally high, making it easier to be perceived as a full-on artistic cross-medium. In ‘Hanna’s Bistro’, there is the beauty of the scenes we see and the beauty of the words going together in perfect harmony.
Secondly, Panka Kovács does a fantastic job playing Hanna, a woman who goes through different states and understands life in times when life may seem hard to understand. She finds a way to escape the pressure by turning her interior universe on the outside, giving it a go as a possible new world.
Thirdly, we appreciated the subtle insert of the whole pandemic scheme in Török’s short in the most beautiful way we’ve come across since the coronavirus madness started. Török brought to light the isolation in a way no one else thought of doing so. We all know how difficult the past year was, and we all saw at least one film or experimental dramatically covering this pandemic. What Török did was to take the whole context and rewrite it as an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ story, where the view on the matter can bring a little bit of joy and hope that one day all of this will be over, and we will be back in our fairytale world.
Written by Vlad A. G