Time Stands Still

A worthy look at Hungary, just after the '56 revolution. The Communists allowed the Magyars to enjoy many western luxuries to ensure they wouldn't revolt again. It caused a national personality crisis

Hungary has produced some excellent films through the years, but this one seems to be a failed attempt by an aspiring film cinematography student's test work. Cinematography, acting, script are uniformly dreadful. In one scene a character jumps through a window head first. In the next scene he is shown with his leg (!) in a cast.

This is an excellent film, rather more than worthy, set, as the previous comment says, in post-1956 (hence post revolution) Hungary. It traces the lives of a group of kids in their last days at school, the father of one of them having fled into exile after the failure of the revolution. The kids are trying to cope with the world the revolution has left behind, and what they chiefly find helpful is western rock n'roll. They want a decadent lifestyle in a puritan state. If rebellion with a cause was no good, why not try being a rebel without a cause? Sex and drugs and the rest.

Sharp, realist, lyrical and poignant, it avoids both sentimentality and cynicism. Nor is it grandeur it is after, but the low hard nitty-gritty of adolescence in a vacuum. Top stuff, and probably the director Gothár's best.

Just prior to the explosion of American teen films in the 1980s that followed American Graffiti (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Risky Business, The Outsiders, Revenge of the Nerds, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand By Me, Sixteen Candles, Teen Wolf, The Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing and My American Cousin just to name a few), Gothar made this Hungarian film about a group of teens living in Budapest. The film traces their lives over the course of over ten years, focusing on two brothers in a family torn apart by politics. The institutions represented by the school and revolutionaries frame the protagonists' plot, but do not interfere. The result is a delightful and intriguing tale of a young man dealing with all the problems of adolescence: women, friends, popularity, sex, alcohol and cigarettes - combined with the ever-present influence of American culture. The film is beautifully photographed and there are some innovative uses of the camera and colour. All the tricks are here: slow-motion, wide angle, different colour; but they do not cloud the film and they are certainly not kitschy. Gothar creates an atmosphere filled with confused and mature teens (more like the dramatic Dead Poets Society rather than the other films mentioned above) that will keep you involved and interested in the characters' lives.

Highly recommended.

In 1982 things were indeed beginning to change in Eastern Europe. Solidarity was founded in Poland in 1980 and began to gather support around the world at the same time that a Polish pope arrived at the Vatican. For the first time, the Soviet Union was hesitant to repress reformists, similar to what it had done in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Reformism proliferated throughout Eastern Europe as the Soviet regime weakened. Leonid Brezhnev would die in 1982 and with him, the future of Soviet communism would also die.

This film is part of this reformist phase. A critical view of the repression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, from the perspective of those who remained. Not because they approved the authoritarian regime, that was established there, but because they did not lose hope of reforming it, and carrying out the revolution, within the system itself.

This hope was transferred to the generation of children of the revolution. This is the essential message of the film. A call to new generations, to look at the example of those who fought and, even when defeated, never stopped believing in the revolution and the construction of a freer and more just society.