Glamour

This is a film about childhood memory and family mythology; some of the events seem perfectly straightforward, while others verge into the fabulous, in the way that time conflates and enlarges childhood memories. It's beautifully made and reminded me a bit of Fellini's idiosyncratic memory films, like AMARCORD.

Historical events are taken for granted, so the more the viewer knows about 20th-century Hungarian history, the more sense the story makes; this would be a good movie to see after watching Szabo's SUNSHINE, which covers the same period, but with a more traditional and informative narrative.

I saw this film as my first film in the Jerusalem Film Festival 2000. It was under the Jewish Films category, and I agree that that was an adequate category. Nevertheless, it has been a while since I saw a film and wondered why did anyone bother financing it... This is the story of Imre, a Hungarian Jew whose family go from the 20's all the way to the 70's (?) but is told through Imre son's eyes. It is obvious at first that the film wants to tackle the subject of the strange circumstances that historical events has created to Jews living in Hungary, starting with Imre looking for a non-Jew wife (and he picks a German woman, no less), the strife during the war (the family hides) and then through the Soviet occupation of Hungary. All the time we are reminded of the Jewish issue in numerous times. But the films gets very quickly lost in scenes that make no sense or importance to the overall plot. Actually, pointing at a plot is hard because the fragments center on the family, or rather individuals with very limited character development and then would take a twist and center on a totally random character for a while and then leave that character without ever returning to it (as it happens with the characters of the priest, the investigator or Fritz, the mother's brother). Then we have a series of unexplained script decisions: the mother has an almost silent part while she is a very important figure in the movie; her German brother shows up in the middle of the war, mumbles a word or two in German and in the next scene he is in bed with his sister (who is soothing him) and he speaks Hungarian (!); the grandfather is a completely odd character that has little relevance to the plot; random characters appear and go; we get to see a young girl undress in front of the story teller (Imre's son) without any reason what so ever story-wise; Imre gives his wife's shirt to his concentration camp commander (or something) who would die (?) wearing what he believed would be his strengthening shirt, spurting out mud instead of blood - now what is this fantasy/surreal element doing here? Is the mother a witch?!; and by the end, the film has lost historical accuracy or the audience's attention. This might have been a fair movie had the director chose a coherent plot, would have stopped filming shots from moving bikes, cars and trains and would have concentrated in believable characters and manageable situations that we could relate to. They are all odd characters, detached from reality and very often complete idiots. And how did the director got anyone to finance this movie - is beyond me.

Unfortunately, this film is neither a "jewish" film or a film about Jews. If this is indeed autobiographical, then the filmmaker, whose parents he is attempting to portray, displays a disturbing ignorance either about Hungarian Jews, the historical period through which they passed, and/or the history of Hungarian Jews themselves. One is left with the suspicion that his parents "saved" themselves by disavowing any connection with their Jewishness and marrying, via the church, even though he was a Jew and she an aryan from the third Reich. Nazi's, extermination, the brutality of the red regime, all of that, is tossed aside. What we do see, instead, is a portrait of a rather conventional and dislikeable ghetto Jew (the grandfather) accompanied by the filmmaker's version of "jewish" music, not unlike the kind of faux Chinese music that used to accompany Charlie Chan. The highly stylized central European poetic style merely served to disguise or obscure the actual facts were concerning his family's development. Yes, the photography was lush; but the script itself was ludicrous.

I saw this at the 2001 Seattle International Film Festival and loved it. Not many people went to see it, but it seemed to me that most of them enjoyed it. I would like to mention that this movie won a Jury special prize at Festroia-Troia International Film Festival, Grand prize at Hungarian Film Week, and was the Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film (I assume for Hungary).

I don't remember much since then but thought that the movie deserved a good review to match the bad one. The cinematography is beautiful in this movie. And I felt the effects for the surreal moments were done quite well. The characters were lovable and I didn't find the movie to be lagging or tedious (caution: I really like slow-paced movies). The music composed for the sound track was also excellent. And I asked the director (who was at the film festival) if he would send me some, which he agreed to, but sadly it never happened.

All in all I would recommend this movie, and I would watch it again if I had the chance.