115 min
4.7
1974
Hungary
Karoly Makk's heartbreaking story of two unmarried sisters who cast wistful glances back at their lives, but still believe in hope and love, earned an Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974. In this follow-up to the director's internationally acclaimed Love, Makk once again exhibits his extraordinary skills at drawing emotionally compelling performances from his talented female leads. Makk's film opposes the bleakness of the outside world with passion, love, and loyalty.
Overview
Reviews
Aqueronte72 wrote:> On the one hand, the indestructible murmur, the purest and most refined literature made images of Makk's whisper, on the other, the fearsome imponderable, and idyllic staging. When the right time comes, the story of Giza and her sister Erzsi Skalla, this work, will be for those who are over 50 years old, not necessarily old or who feel that way, their favorite work and that of many like them, due to the circumspection merciless, by the spaces of silence, ("when we remain silent we become unpleasant, when we speak we become ridiculous", said one of my favorite European authors Herta Muller, in Herztier) by the arrhythmias of memory and of the past relived from the photo to the closed eyes, from closed eyes to the obtuse game of memory recomposition, because of the pleasure one should not feel for someone one has loved "Erzsi, I wouldn't even have recognized you on the street, my angel", because of melancholy that it should not be shown when playing that piano piece, together with Viktor and his emphysema, because of the friend Paula, because of the jealousy of older sister to younger or vice versa, also being redheaded, because of the shameful confidences of the elderly-other people that we we will see forced You will recognize them, like children who cheated on an exam, or broke a piece of china and hid it from adults. We will remember that since we were children we wanted to beat our older or younger brother, and now that we are old, not so young, little or nothing has changed our immature desires for disinterested truth and empty usefulness. We are faced with a supreme double touch of genius from Károly Makk; both for the style, epistolary, fantastic without completely detaching feet from the realistic,... as for the motif, of a roots deeply committed to the nostalgia of what has vanished. I did not quote Muller gratuitously, like her, although for different autobiographical reasons, Karoly Makk has an amazing, unique musicality, an impressive narrative plasticity for those of us who love detail. To make matters worse, returning to Erzsi's little drama, as if the sudden memories, the visit of the impossible love, especially since she insisted on canceling it with a telegram that did not arrive or was ignored by Viktor, the fortuitous meeting despite the rejection letter, as if the smell of experiences or the dry leaf kept in good times and found inside a book in bad times were not enough, Erzsi is asked in Summer to consider her retirement and pension in the fall, as a teacher singing, just when they were rehearsing the play The Cat by Edward Grieg. Whoever supposes to replace us always proves to be a doubly executioner: firstly by evoking that which we ourselves were in the past, being young, secondly by moving ourselves without even being able to recognize our old age doing what we love the most, not knowing how to be as we were in the past. , nor knowing how to be still as in the past in the present continuous. And the Giza-Erzsi epistolary counterpoint remains, squeezed by time and dilated by words and mental representations like written sheets balled up under the pillow.I said at the beginning, Giza and her sister Erzsi at the beginning? Or should I have said Paula? That's the problem with mazes. If one loses the thread of the occurrence, one can lose track of where we are and who has accompanied us.
