Love, Károly Makk (Hungary, 1971)

(Szelerem). Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Makk’s Love is one of the great masterpieces of Hungarian cinema, “a marvelous film, made with a precision of eye and spirit which records real love” (Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker). Largely set in an apartment in Budapest during the oppressive Stalinist era of the early fifties, the serenely beautiful Love tells of an elderly, bedridden woman (brilliantly played by Lili Darvas) whose romanticized memories of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and her youth before the onslaught of World War I offer her some reprieve from her present existence. Her daughter-in-law Luca (Mari Töröcsik) sustains her with stories of her son János’s success as a film director in the States; in fact János is a political prisoner serving a ten-year sentence in a Budapest jail under the Rakosi regime. “(Love) recalls the best work of Satyajit Ray in the seemingly effortless ways that Makk moves between objective and subjective points-of-view and creates a world dense with feeling, with echoes, aural and visual, of past and present” (Vincent Canby, New York Times).

—Susan Oxtoby

• Written by Tibor Déry, based on two of his short stories. Photographed by Janos Toth. With Lili Darvas, Mari Töröcsik, Iván Darvas, Erzsi Orsolya. (86 mins, In Hungarian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)