Film / music / memory

A King Who Learned to Listen

Queen in Budapest and the Small Gestures That Endure

Published 22 October 2026

On the restored Queen Budapest, seen at BFI IMAX, 5:30pm, 17th October 2026.

Freddie Mercury ends the evening wearing a crown. Yet the most extraordinary thing he does in Queen Budapest may be to look at his hand.

There, rather less majestically, are the words he needs.

A man who can command a stadium has prepared a small insurance policy against forgetting a Hungarian folk song. It is a beautifully human arrangement: supreme confidence, supported by discreet homework.

That apparent contradiction runs through the film. Queen’s performance at Budapest’s Népstadion on 27 July 1986 offers all the things a stadium concert promises: scale, precision, familiar songs enlarged to architectural proportions. But its emotional force gathers around moments when that machinery makes room for something less assured.

A visitor tries to speak the language. A guitarist becomes a tourist. A rock star attempts an awkward conversation. A national flag acquires a companion.

The film preserves a band capable of overwhelming an audience. Its most moving passages show them finding ways to meet one.

I took Mum to see the film as a surprise on Saturday 17 October 2026. Our screening at BFI IMAX was sandwiched between sold-out showings of The Odyssey. An art installation and a desktop gaming showcase added to the bustle of the London Film Festival’s closing days. There was a lot going on.

It would have been easy to miss this one isolated showing. I am glad we caught it.

Something about its place in that crowded programme made the experience more affecting. Amid everything else, a space had briefly opened for an evening in Budapest forty years earlier. We had to notice it, choose it and be there.

Perhaps that gave the screening an unexpected affinity with the concert itself. Whatever the organisers intended, I felt a correspondence between the two occasions: people gathering in one place, at one time, for something they could not quite repeat. The film could be shown again. This Saturday with Mum would happen only once.

On the screen, meanwhile, was a performance whose particular combination of people and possibility belonged to another generation. For a little while, we could share a room with it.

The new restoration can reasonably be associated with Sir Peter Jackson, but it also represents a substantial Hungarian achievement. The National Film Institute Hungary preserved the original negatives and digitised them through its Film Lab; Jackson’s Park Road Post Production undertook the restoration work. The original film was directed by Hungarian cinematographer János Zsombolyai. Queen’s announcement separately credits the new soundtrack remix to the band’s studio team, working from the original multitrack recordings.

Those distinctions matter because the experience rests on several generations of people paying attention: the original filmmakers, the archivists who kept their work, and the technicians who have made it newly available.

On an IMAX screen, restoration also changes the emotional distance.

An old concert recording can arrive with its historical status already attached. The softened image tells us to admire a vanished era. Greater clarity unsettles that comfortable arrangement. A glance becomes legible. A joke acquires timing. The person inside an established icon becomes harder to overlook.

We know we are watching the past. For stretches of the performance, our senses cease to behave accordingly.

That is where the poignancy begins. The film repeatedly makes an evening feel available which we know cannot happen again.

“Tavaszi szél vizet áraszt,” the Hungarian folk song Mercury performs with Brian May, makes that tension unusually tender. Mercury learned the words phonetically and used the writing on his hand as a prompt; the audience joins him. Both May and Roger Taylor have recalled the emotional importance of the moment.

The gesture is modest in practical terms. One song, learned for one audience.

Its effect is enormous because it briefly reverses the direction of accommodation. Much of an international rock concert asks the audience to enter the performer’s world: learn these songs, recognise these cues, sing these English words. Here, the visiting superstar undertakes some of the journey himself.

He has something to get right.

That gives the audience a different kind of power. They can recognise the song before he has finished establishing it. They know its language more securely than he does. Their participation can support him.

Mercury remains a consummate performer throughout, but the preparation is visible enough to let affection enter through the cracks. His uncertainty gives the crowd something to respond to beyond admiration.

The voice that usually supplies the answer is, for a moment, asking for help.

There is a useful restraint to observing this politically. Hungary was still within the Eastern Bloc, and the concert carried considerable symbolic significance. But a moving musical exchange need not be inflated into a claim that four musicians dismantled the Cold War. The smaller achievement is substantial enough: a vast public gathering experiences a visitor taking its culture seriously.

For a few minutes, recognition becomes audible.

Then there is “Tutti Frutti.”

In the film’s running order, Little Richard’s song precedes “Bohemian Rhapsody”: a wonderfully abrupt passage from rock and roll exuberance into one of Queen’s most elaborate constructions.

At first, the cover can feel like a glorious diversion. A band with this catalogue has briefly wandered into somebody else’s party.

But it reveals something essential about Mercury’s musical imagination. His theatrical grandeur contains an appetite for rhythm, mischief, exaggeration and the sheer physical pleasure of singing. The apparently spontaneous flourishes remind us that his voice is an instrument he enjoys playing, rather than merely a means of delivering famous lyrics.

It would be misleading to treat everything that sounds loose as something invented that evening. Experienced performers rehearse ways of appearing free; familiar routines can still contain fresh decisions. The pleasure lies in hearing musicians respond within that space.

Placed beside Little Richard, Queen’s extravagant musical vocabulary acquires a clear ancestry. The vocal abandon, the flamboyance, the permission to be excessive: these did not materialise in a recording studio with an opera budget.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” follows with all its changes of scale and mood. The contrast makes Queen’s range feel less like a collection of incompatible styles than the expression of a remarkably inclusive appetite.

They can build the cathedral. They also remember the dance floor.

The Budapest scenes are crucial to this impression of people existing beyond their stage functions. The film includes the band’s arrival by hydrofoil, sightseeing and recreational excursions; May’s interlude includes a hot-air-balloon trip, while Taylor gets an altogether more earthbound opportunity for speed.

During May’s extended guitar passage, the movement into his offstage life creates an especially suggestive relationship between sound and image.

Onstage, his guitar playing makes space. Notes hang, return and overlap; a single musician seems able to populate the air around him. Against that sound, the excursion into the city—and upwards above it—feels unexpectedly apt.

The connection is an interpretation of the editing, rather than a claim about what May intended. But it gives the sequence an emotional coherence beyond “here is what the guitarist did on his day off.”

We hear a musician extending his reach while seeing a visitor widen his field of vision.

These passages also interrupt the hierarchy of the concert. Onstage, each member has a defined job. Away from it, their different temperaments become available through smaller choices: what catches their interest, how they occupy unfamiliar surroundings, how comfortably they respond to attention.

The footage is still selected and shaped for a film. It offers glimpses, not unrestricted access. Nevertheless, those glimpses allow the magnificent organisation called Queen to resolve briefly into four individuals.

John Deacon’s conversation with the young girl introduces a different kind of intimacy: the sort that can feel uncomfortable to watch.

There is room to acknowledge that response without turning it into a judgment about his intentions. A short, edited encounter cannot establish those.

What makes the sequence revealing is the contrast in social scale. A musician can perform before an enormous audience with complete assurance and still look awkward trying to sustain an ordinary conversation. The child, meanwhile, is under no obligation to provide the delighted response a concert film seems to expect.

The exchange has little of the reciprocal rhythm that makes Mercury’s crowd interaction so exhilarating. Questions and answers do not necessarily produce connection simply because a camera is present.

If Edgware is indeed the place named in the dialogue, the natural reading is Edgware in north London; I could not independently verify that wording from a reliable transcript.

The scene’s awkwardness belongs in an honest account of the film. Affection for the band does not require every preserved moment to become charming. Equally, an uneasy impression should remain an impression, without acquiring an unsupported allegation.

Its presence makes the surrounding mastery more interesting. Social ease, like musical virtuosity, is unevenly distributed.

Mercury’s dual-flag gesture works through a different understanding of timing.

The Union flag establishes one image; the Hungarian flag supplies the answering revelation. The audience is given a moment in which to recognise itself within the spectacle.

There is showmanship in that construction. Of course there is. Mercury understands the value of a reveal down to his bones.

But preparation does not empty a gesture of feeling. Learning a song, arranging a flag and judging the moment to display it are ways of making regard visible. Care often requires a little stage management.

The two flags allow the encounter to retain both its participants. The visitors bring their identity; the hosts see theirs acknowledged. Difference remains present, shared within one image.

It is a compact visual counterpart to the Hungarian song. In each case, the performance makes room for something the audience already possesses.

The crown and robe at the end bring the evening’s play with identity to its most splendidly ridiculous conclusion.

As the recorded “God Save the Queen” accompanies the farewell, Mercury becomes royalty by the ancient constitutional mechanism of putting on something magnificent and behaving as though the matter is settled.

The joke has several layers: the band’s name, the theatrical entitlement, the cheerful extravagance of the costume. It also allows the concert to finish with a ceremony. After all that collective exertion, somebody has to devise a way of saying goodbye.

The coronation supplies a last image large enough for the occasion.

Yet its grandeur depends on our willingness to participate in the fiction. The crown has no authority beyond the audience’s delight in seeing him wear it. His sovereignty is renewed by applause.

That makes a lovely companion to the earlier uncertainty over the Hungarian words. The man with the prompt on his hand and the man in the crown belong to the same performance. Vulnerability and command continually sustain one another.

Budapest came near the end of the Magic Tour, which proved to be Queen’s final tour with Mercury. The concert was followed by five more shows, concluding at Knebworth on 9 August 1986.

That knowledge changes how we hear the evening, particularly a song such as “Who Wants to Live Forever.”

But hindsight can become possessive. It encourages us to turn every smile into courage, every farewell into prophecy, every moment of joy into evidence of approaching loss.

The people on the screen were living an evening whose future had not yet arrived.

Their enjoyment deserves to retain that freedom.

Perhaps the restoration’s greatest emotional achievement is to make room for both experiences: ours, with everything we know, and theirs, with an audience in front of them and the next musical cue still to come.

The flags are still waiting for their reveal. The borrowed song still has somewhere to lead. A guitarist is listening to the sound he has sent into the air. Mercury checks the words on his hand.

Outside our screening, the festival carried on: other films, other attractions, other audiences finding their way in. What might have slipped past in a crowded programme had become an evening with Mum that I wanted to keep.