A Tale of the 1990s: A Case Study of Nimród Antal’s The Whiskey Bandit as an Allegory of Post-Socialist Nostalgia

Abstract

The story of Attila Ambrus, also known as the Whiskey Bandit or the Whiskey Robber, is one of the most memorable and widely remembered phenomena from 1990s Hungary. Between 1993 and 1999 Ambrus committed thirty robberies in post offices, banks, travel agencies and other financial institutions. What makes his persona stand out is that despite being a criminal, he not only became a celebrity with widespread media presence, but also a divisive hero: he enjoyed massive popularity as he outmaneuvered police repeatedly. This article reads The Whiskey Bandit (dir. Nimród Antal, 2017), a cinematic adaptation of his criminal career, as an allegory of a specific post-socialist nostalgia in Hungary, a longing for the brief period after the regime change when social, cultural, economic and political transformations re-structured the country’s landscape in an abrupt and even confusing manner, yet offered a moment of hope for endless possibilities and joining the progress of  Western modernity. The analysis contextualizes the film’s non-­linear temporal and cacophonic spatial structures as an allegory of 1990s Hungarian experience; furthermore, examines nostalgic overtones in the film as a contemporary reflexive perspective on the euphoric moment of the regime change and following disillusionment of post-regime-change Hungary.

Keywords:

• Hungarian cinema
• post-regime-change
• temporality
• knotted time
• nostalgia
• allegory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In order to avoid any confusion around the real-life story of Attila Ambrus and the film adaptation of his illegal career, I will refer to the real life person as Ambrus or Attila Ambrus, the character in the film as the Whiskey Robber and the film itself as The Whiskey Bandit.

2 For further details on his life see Julien Rubinstein’s 2004 Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Devices and Broken Hearts.

3 All the Hungarian quotes were translated into English by the author of this article.

4 Sándor Rózsa was a 19th century outlaw of the Hungarian Great Plains, he is the best-known highwayman in Hungary.

5 Given that the film was made in 2017, the correlation between disappointment, post-socialist nostalgia and the current socio-political reality of Hungary would also be worth analysing, however, it points beyond the scope of the article. Prominent Hungarian film scholars are currently researching the memory politics of cinema of the last fourteen years, and building a volume with the working title Illiberal Screens: Film Culture in Hungary Under the Orbán Regime.

6 According to Hungarian laws he was not allowed to appear as this older version of himself in the film, so even here we can see Bence Szalay portraying him.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fanni Antalóczy

Fanni Antalóczy is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies, Eszterházy Károly Catholic University. She defended her dissertation titled Queering the Iron Curtain: Spaces of Otherness in British and Eastern European Cinema in 2021. Her research interests include Eastern European cinema, representations of marginalized identities and post-socialist theory.