Le grand cahier

This is one of those movies where you expect to have some central message, and at the end you get none

It is just pointless evil where good is bad, bad is good, and at the end you just dont care anymore

All, wrapped up with the most terrible editing I've ever seen, when one scene leads to another too fast, too messy, too crappy

It's 1944. Twin boys live comfortable city lives. Their parents are worried about the impending Nazi defeat and upheaval. Their mother brings them to live with their bitter grandmother. They don't even know her who has been living alone in the Hungarian rural home estranged from her daughter. She's angry and beats on the boys. Local girl Harelip steals from them but she turns the table on the boys and they're the ones getting beaten. Nazis have a camp nearby. After constant beatings, the boys decide to toughen up and learn from the evil surrounding them.

It's a disturbing violent world being portrayed. The twins are not necessarily good actors. They don't get much sympathy. The grandmother is fascinating in her ugliness. It's a cold-hearted fable without anybody to root for.

jkbonner1 has written an excellent and in-depth review of the movie, all I would like to add is that this is the first and only movie that I have ever seen that I think succeeds in realistically portraying the devastating human aspects of WWII on a personal level without resorting to sentimentalism or nostalgia. Although gruesome with plenty of disturbing scenes, it is not grotesque. For me the only movie that comes close would be Apocalypse Now - which is, of course, a very different movie but I think similar in that both give a glimpse of the inhumanity and insanity of war. I also really admired about the movie that every key character undergoes a complete transformation - it presents us with an initial situation where it seems obvious who is in the right and who is "evil", and succeeds in turning everything upside down by the end of the movie, including our own definitions of right and wrong and good and evil. The movie does of course have some inconsistencies, some scenes appear highly unlikely and the boys seem to meet with every misfortune imaginable. But I think such criticism is beside the point. Through the eyes of the boys we are shown events that did happen over and over again to thousands of people. And in the end it is up to us to consider what is "good", whether we have a right to judge any of the characters in the movie, and given such circumstances how much of our own humanity and values could any of use have maintained? BTW I signed up to IMDb just to be able to share these thoughts with you about this movie :-) and I "look forward to" one day reading the book the movie is based upon (Agota Kristof: Le grand cahier).

The Hungarian film directors are often consumed up in photography and do not care of the story. Thanks God, not here. Agota Kristof's Le Grand Cahier has such a strong storyline that it cannot be destroyed. However attempt to do so can be detected here.

I hope that after a while all directors learn that a book itself is not a script, they can use movie to tell the story, even leaving out some key elements of the book.

Some scenes cry that were shot on the same streets, same interiors.

But this is it, that's why I gave only 8/10, as the film works. It takes you to a journey where you forget your soda and popcorn and step out to the real word afterward a bit changed. You know that it can happen. As in the summary, the circumstances can bring out the evil from everyone. Even 10 year old boys. We know this since the Lord of the Flies, but it is good to be remembered to it from time to time...

The horror of war through the eyes of two boys. War has it's effect on every age group of people.War stories have been told several times, though this is quite different it's own way. It leaves you thinking, how devastating the war can be, and it leaves a mark on everyone through the ages to come. About this movie, the direction is superb, the acting especially the two boys are wonderful. Even the music is worth mentioning, is superb. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. The film has been selected as the Hungarian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards.