In the brilliant and original drama Hier, middle-aged Victor Ganz has built a successful global engineering enterprise. He takes what he thinks is a quick trip to Morocco to quell an apparent hiccup in one of his construction projects. But when he arrives, he finds that the problem with his project doesn’t exist after all, but a mysterious stranger appears and threatens him about something else altogether. Decades before, Victor had worked in Morocco as an adventuresome young man; incomplete memories of that experience are revived and begin to obsess him. He becomes a detective but doesn’t fully understand what he is looking for in his own past.
Soon Victor is immersed in puzzling déjà vu. Is he going crazy? Is he imagining something in his past or his present? Who is the woman he is driven to find again? And why does Victor keep getting beaten up like a human piñata?
Referring to Russian unpredictability, Winston Churchill said, ” It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” He might have just watched Hier. as Victor’s confusion becomes ever more trippy.
Ganz is played by Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov in a tour de force. As Ivanov ‘s Victor is more and more consumed by the puzzles, he becomes increasingly perplexed, dogged, battered and exhausted.
Ivanov is best known for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters, Mr. Bebe, the sexually harrassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer.
This is a Hungarian film, but it takes place in Morocco, Some of the dialogue is in English, most is in subtitled French, with some in unsubtitled Arabic (because the protagonist is not fluent in Arabic).
The film’s original Hungarian title is Tegnap, the word for “Yesterday”; the international title is the French word for “yesterday”, Hier (a marketing mistake IMO). Of course, the protagonist’s obsession is an episode in the past – yesterday – that he remembers and understands only in fragments.
Hier is an impressive first feature for writer-director Bálint Kenyeres. Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Hier, which is one of the world cinema highlights of the festival.