In 1889, the Prince Royal Of Hungary and Bohemia, Crown Prince Of Austria Rudolf Franz Karl Josef committed suicide with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, at Mayerling hunting lodge. The Crown Prince was thirty years old and the Baroness just seventeen. Private Vices, Public Virtues (1976) is Miklós Jancsó’s highly imaginative rendering of the events leading up to that famous scandal which Jancsó stages as murder at the hands of Imperial guards.
By 1976 Miklós Jancsó had left his native Hungary to make films in Italy. Jancsó may have escaped state censorship, but his films in Italy were often required to have certain amounts of sexually titillating material. Private Vices, Public Virtues is a succession of bacchanals captured in Miklós Jancsó’s signature long takes of elaborately choreographed action. The film is a kind of erotic ballet that cavalcades across the screen with an unmatched exuberance.
Private Vices, Public Virtues is more than just an escape into a fetishized nineteenth century. The debauchery over which Crown Prince Rudolf (Lajos Balázsovits) presides is indicative of the privileges of the ruling class and a literal manifestation of Rudolf’s idleness as he waits to inherit his father’s crown. Cloistered by all of the comforts his kingdom could afford, Rudolf has lived a life detached from the realities of the world; caught in a developmental stasis, a perpetual adolescent. The erotically charged antics of Rudolf and his cohort become, in Miklós Jancsó’s cinema, the audience’s diversions as well.
When the narrative of history interjects itself into the revelries of Private Vices, Public Virtues it feels like an interruption of the kind of spectatorship being practiced just as much as it is a brutal reminder to Rudolf that there is more to his existence than his fun and games at Mayerling lodge. The inevitable nature of history is the all destroying truth of Jancsó’s cinema. No construct, be it Rudolf’s games or the prison in The Round-Up (1966), is impervious to the truth of history, the ultimate revolutionary force.
Within the insular complex of the narrative of Private Vices, Public Virtues one could interpret Rudolph as a surrogate for the Hungarian cinema during the Soviet occupation. The censure that the Crown Prince’s party faces is not so dissimilar from the Hungarian cinema’s resistance to and defiance of the Soviet state. Even if this is not consciously intended, Private Vices, Public Virtues begs this reading, particularly in light of how Miklós Jancsó has used Hungarian history in his films as a commentary on contemporary events.
