Eszter Hagyatéka. A good portrait of a psychopath (con-man) and how their manipulative charm does not wear off even when their falseness and emptiness is transparent. The only thing that is not perfectly repulsive about them (for those who, unlike Eszter, are not otherwise in their thrall) is their almost touchingly naive conviction that everyone else is a psychopath too, “righteousness” being just another con. In this film, Lajos even effects to want to co-opt Eszter’s haplessly unvindictive righteousness to complement his own “insufficiently talented” M.O.
Eszter’s Lajos is unlike Mann’s Felix Krull, whose manipulative skills are grounded in a capacity for empathic mind-reading that is then used for exploitation. But there is still the same sense of an inescapable superficiality always yearning (but only, of course, superficially) for depth, while addicted only to the allures of the surface. Perhaps it’s a mistake to say that psychopaths have no feelings: They do, but they are faint and fleeting. They need to use method acting to simulate a soul — a soul that they know so well to be false, that they cannot conceive it to be otherwise in anyone else.