He won't be back for a long time

SASA MAJUMA | Tuesday September 2, 2008 00:00

It is a most unusual film by the great Hungarian director Kroly Makk. It opens with a 16-minute 'Introduction' (2003) in which Makk explains the background to his making of Love, a film that required many patient years to create and finish. In it you learn about his relation to Tibor Dry's life story, on which the movie is based, his problems of identifying the three lead actors, including a trip to Berlin to consider Bertolt Brecht's widow, and the delays caused in the 1960s when trying to make a film about a political prisoner and the problems of living under a dictatorship.

Makk also explains how he decided to visually recreate an old lady's reminiscences - not through elaborate flash backs in sepia or out of focus, or some other technique that is normally used, but by simply pausing (all too briefly for me) on stills and scenes from her past as she recalls them.

A dying octogenarian woman (Lili Darvas, a famous Hungarian actress), who has been told by her doctor that she will live to be a hundred, is grieving for one son and missing her other son, Janos (Ivn Darvas). Her daughter-in-law, Luca (Mari Trcsik), fearing the truth will unnerve her mother-in-law, fabricates a complicated tale and hides social realities from her (a theme to be used again in Goodbye, Lenin, by Wolfgang Becker in 2003).

Janos has vanished into a prison system that allows no visitors or communication. Luca does not even know if her husband is still alive. Her invention for her mother-in-law (and perhaps for herself too, to help sustain her belief in him) is that Janos is In New York City where he is directing the greatest film ever made. She is also able to create letters from the old woman's son complete with old American postage stamps, as if they were mailed from the States. These letters the octogenarian reads with a small magnifying glass.
The woman who cares for the old woman is Irn (Erzsi Orsolya). Luca visits from her and Janos's small flat, as she knows if he ever gets out he will come there first. Irn wonders how the old woman can be fooled by Luca's poise -flowers, presents, and the  'letters from New York' that Luca brings when she visits? Luca replies: 'Where her son is concerned she is deaf and blind.' Luca has been fired from her job as a teacher because of being married to a political prisoner. She survives by slowly selling off the family's possessions. She has been forced by the state to accept a 'co-tenant' and to move into the servant's room.

The old woman is ill and a medical doctor who sings (Laszlo Menstros) visits her. She calls for the doctor who speaks German so she can talk about Goethe with him. He is the one who said she would live to be a hundred. Perhaps he has died before her? In her small dacha she is surrounded by her books and other possessions and the remembrances of things past that flash through her mind. Luca nurtures these memories by getting her to talk again about things that happened years ago, even though Luca has heard it all before many times. She knows that the retelling is healing.

This is a film about real love (not carnal love) and what it means: love of a language; love of your books; love of Goethe; love of recalling things that enriched one's life as one travelled through it; love of a beautiful cloth to cover a bedpan; love of a lost son; love for a missing son; love held in one's mind while incarcerated year after year (Janos was sentenced to 10 years in jail on trumped up charges); enduring love of a missing husband; and love between a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, held together by loving the same man. This film has been aptly named and deserves all the accolades it has received.

 Love is one hour and 24 minutes long. It is preceded by a 16-minute introduction by the director Karoly Makk. It is rated PG. It is a black and white in Hungarian with English subtitles. The script is by Peter Bacso, based on the autobiography of Tibor Dery. The cinematographer Janos Toth, the editor is Gyorgy Sivo and the music is by Andras Mihaly.

Don't miss the sequel made 30 years later with the same actors, A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda, next week.
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