Precious Cameo

By JAY COCKS

LOVE

Directed by KAROLY MAKK Screenplay by TIBOR DERY

This exceptionally fine Hungarian film about death and renewal is made with a sort of serene melancholy, a rich understanding of the tone and textures of mortality. It is a quiet movie, of short focus but great perspective in its untroubled contemplation of the measure of loss.

Love derives much of its strength from the fine accumulation of gesture and detail that Director Makk has worked into the modest fabric of his story. An old lady (Lili Darvas), nearly 100 and dying with dignity and resignation from the kind of fatigue that cannot be diagnosed or reversed, lies all day in her bed, tended by a maid and by her daughter-in-law Luca (Mari Torocsik). The old lady lives in a twilight of memory, where past and present tend to flow together into a kind of future-imperfect tense. The room is kept clean and carefully lit, although both the room itself and the world outside look dour and gray, as if everything were being drained of color and of life, like the old lady herself.

Only her memories have any radiance. She thinks of riding through a misty forest, of a broad hat ribbon of black silk bought for her as a present by her husband, of a holiday with her family, all of them together in a small hotel room. Sometimes there are only bright flashes of objects recalled: a pair of spectacles, a boat, a book, a favorite hat.

Luca encourages the old lady's reveries and replenishes her fantasies with letters apparently from her son Janos, who is said to be making a film in America. In fact, he is a political prisoner, serving a ten-year term for some unspecified crime against the state. Luca keeps this from the old lady, and instead constructs letters with elaborate lies about his success and about the richness of America. The old lady reads the letters with a large magnifying glass, thrilling to each detail like a child hearing a fairy tale, relishing the deception they represent even as, in some way, she seems to understand it.

Makk and his two superb actresses excel at capturing the ambivalences between the old lady and her daughter-in-law, the mingling of affection and exasperation, rivalry and devotion. Soon, but quietly, the old lady dies. Not long afterward, her son (Ivan Darvas) is released from prison, with as little warning and reason as he was first put there. He savors, almost timidly, the sudden sensations of freedom, then, a little anxiously, returns home to his wife. Luca tells him of his mother's passing, and he mourns, though not for long. In his wife he is reminded again of strength and of regeneration. The old lady's death is balanced.

There is not a moment of grandiloquence or sentimentality in Dery's screenplay, which he adapted from two of his own short novels. Makk's direction is precisely orchestrated to reveal each separate tone and facet in his three characters. Darvas, once a leading lady with Max Reinhardt and the widow of Playwright Ferenc Molnar, has an air of slightly tenuous regality about her. She can suggest both the old lady's crustiness and her vulnerability without patronization. Her long, feeble fingers beating against her chest seem to be trying to tap again some vanished source of strength. Torocsik, equally extraordinary, brings qualities to her role that women on-screen seldom have outside the work of Ingmar Bergman: strength, resource and a constant dignity. As Janos, Ivan Darvas (no relation to Lili) conveys exactly the right feeling of confusion and displacement. He gives his fare to a trolley conductor as if he expects to have his hand slapped for impudence. At the end of his journey, wait ing for his wife, he paces restlessly, uneasily. He is like a phantom in his own home. *Jay Cocks

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