LGM Film Club, Part 490: Love Film

I’ve been having my annual rewatch of some of my favorite films and enjoying it as much always. One film I watched that I hadn’t seen in many years was Istvan Szabo’s 1970’s Love Film. Starring Andres Balint and Judit Halasz, the film is both a meditation on love across space and time and a discussion of recent Hungarian history, both the Nazis and the 1956 repression. Jansci is a young boy, maybe 5 years old, during World War II, who has to live for awhile with the family of his friend Kata. They are best friends and sort of in love as young kids might be. He is a bit go along to get along. She has no tolerance for any of this communist bullshit. One great scene has them getting in trouble after the war for spending too much time together and they have to go in front of the judges of the Communist Youth League they are in and she tells them off. No good comrade, she.

Well, they drift apart for whatever reason and then reconnect some years later, when they are about 17. By now, it is 1956. They start to date, but she flees during the Soviet occupation. They stay in touch by letter. A decade later, Jansci is able to travel and gets to France, where Kata now lives and works in some small fashion shop. They have a brief few days together, where they have sex and reconnect and meet with the other Hungarian refugees there. But can they really make it work given time and space and politics, despite their clear deep love for each other? Spoiler alert: History gets in the way.

The film is one of my favorite eastern European films period. It’s not a straight story. Rather, Szabo tells it through flashback and repetition, dreams and thoughts spoken to the camera. World War II and its aftermath hangs over all of it. It’s also really just a lovely piece of work. Szabo went on to direct several more films, most notably Mephisto, which I know I have seen but I don’t really remember anything from. He hasn’t really had any kind of revival in the US at least and like a lot of the 60s and 70s European directors who were never quite as famous internationally as Godard or Truffaut or Wenders, has been kind of forgotten about. But this film is very much worth seeking out.

I don’t think any of the few clips on YouTube even have English subtitles. But there was DVD put out by Kino many years ago, which I own. As always, if you remotely care about your media, you need to own some kind of physical copy of it (even if it is data backed up on hard drives or whatever). Otherwise, you are trusting a corporation to take care of your art and who would be stupid enough to do that?