Hungarian Film Magazine – The Cannes 2016 Issue

A Film that
Does not Age
Károly Makk’s ‘Love’
in Cannes Classics
45 years after the first showing in competition
at Cannes, 'Love' (Szerelem) is back on the big
screen. The audience at the 69 th Festival de
Cannes will get the chance to see Károly Makk's
masterpiece selected for the Cannes Classics
section, which pays particular attention to
restored versions of classic films.
Károly Makk, who celebrated his 90 th birthday
last year, was born in the Hungarian town of
Berettyóújfalu. He grew up in a family of film
enthusiasts, so already at a young age his fate
was irreversibly bound to the calling he would
later choose for himself. He went on to create
one of the richest and most significant films in
the history of Hungarian cinema. After having
trained as an associate director alongside the
country's greats at the time, Zoltán Fábri and
Zoltán Várkonyi, Makk debuted in the Cannes
competition in 1955 with his very own comedy,
'Liliomfi'.
A good 15 years and several directions later,
'Love' became the work of a creator who by that
stage was highly esteemed. The film is based on
the contemporary Hungarian author Tibor Déry's
two short stories, 'Love' and 'Two Women' and
remains almost entirely faithful to its sources.
The first is about the politically motivated
government show trials whose outcomes were
decided upon even before the trials. The second
is about the consequences of the events of the
Hungarian uprising and the fight for freedom
against the Soviet forces, which broke out in
1956. Makk presents the two in a straightforward
and realistic way. In 'Love', the reader finds out
about how B., a convicted politician, got from
Pest to Buda, first by tram and then by taxi,
from a world of inhumane workings of authority
and constant tension to home: his wife, his son,
solidarity and compassion. The most iconic
scene in the novel also finds its way into the
final minutes of the future full-length feature
film, when the woman washes the man, at once
raising him to a Christ-like pedestal and giving
back to him the intimacy worthy of humans.
'Two Women' takes the reader through the
days spent by a mother and her daughter-inlaw,
which form the core of Makk's film. One is
waiting for her husband who has been convicted
for political reasons, while telling the other that
her son has gone to America to direct films. She
does everything in her power to make sure that
everything should at least go as well as it can
for him, as the mother will most probably not
make it to see him return home. Everything aims
towards this until the very last moment, the very
last gesture.
While Károly Makk and his cinematographer
János Tóth prepared their film 'Cats' Play', which
was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign
Film category, they started working on an
association montage technique, which they had
in fact already used in their earlier collaborative
work, 'Love'. This is how the latter film became
the story of two women. The older woman has
obstinately lived almost a century waiting for
her son, but she's about to give up. The younger
woman remains faithful to her husband and
as she wants to live her whole life with him, she
cannot give up. The life shared by these two
Love / Szerelem
by Károly Makk – Cannes Classics
15 May 10pm Théâtre Buñuel PREMIERE
38
HUNGARIAN FILM MAGAZINE