Ferenc Kós returns home as a broken Soviet POW in 1945. His wife has died and Tera, sister-in-law of the sick man, looks after him. According to wagging tongues, she is angling to tie him to her for good. The situation changes dramatically when Ferenc recovers and brings a pretty bride back to the house. Tension between the three of them is stretched to breaking point. One of the most balladic films in Hungarian cinema raises serious moral issues using new, pre-modern expressionist tools of landscape depiction.
Supporting film:
Waltz
Valcer, Hungarian animation, colour, 1984, dir: Csaba Varga, No Dialogue, 3’
The dimension of eternity and the fleeting moment, the past rapidly fading into nothingness, the drama of the apparently endless present of war intertwine and collide in this short cartoon. Objects of the interwar period disintegrate in front of our eyes while a couple desperately cling to one another amidst the wreckage.
