On Film
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen YOUNG LOVE BY ROBERT ASAHINA M_, first shown in the United States at the 1977 New York Film Festival, languished for almost a year without an American distributor; when it finally...
...Andras Novak (Jan Nowicki, also the star of Women), who has been forced to return to Hungary after overstaying his academic fellowship in the United States, travels to Budapest and visits his former girl friend, Anna (Anna Karina...
...I wouldn't," Zsuzsi snips, before stalking off with a tight little smile...
...Of course, credit is also due the principal performers, who respond to the director's cues with extraordinary skill...
...The second is the acting of Bernard and Olivier...
...Olivier, of course, could have played the part in his sleep...
...the sexual vibrations register only by implication...
...by his own description, Andras is "a clown . .. who has lost his way between two countries...
...his Andras evidences all the willful stupidity that stems from uncontrollable anxiety...
...But Lane is all that, and more—a Lissome, coltish creature who, in the blink of an eye, transforms herself from an awkwardly lovely adolescent to an impossibly alluring, nearly full-grown female...
...The filmmaker's deft touch is also evident in her handling of the relationship between Andras and Zsuzsi...
...the transformation from a freckle-faced kid to a lascivious Lolita is sudden and frightening...
...the sexual electricity dissipates with the soapsuds and cosmetics trickling down the drain...
...As his relationships crumble around him, he blurts out to the uncomprehending youngster all the fears he felt in America—the anomie and the frantic scrambling for a sense of belonging—and thus all the unrelieved anxieties he still suffers in Hungary...
...But this time, finding a curious stability in Zsuzsi's companionship, he stays on and joins a collective farm...
...Somehow, he manages to maintain just the right note of romantic humor that had virtually disappeared with the musical comedies (like Gigi) of the '50s...
...shooting at close- to mid-range with only the smallest necessary camera movements, she patiently defines a small space at the outset and lets the characters move about in it, inviting the audience to experience an almost suffocating involvement in their lives...
...The odd couple sets up house in the city, but the domestic arrangement is short-lived...
...For a while, at least he is at peace...
...Hill's single lapse is his fondness for showing clips from his previous works...
...Yet by the end we realize that Andras' burden is not society, or the State, or his parents, or his lovers...
...Alienated from his past and uncertain of his future, caught between an omnipotent Communist state and an equally oppressive rural heritage, he appears to be an archetypal tragicomic victim of modernization...
...Her part, of course, is complete fantasy...
...Finally, Lane is simply the most charming young actress to appear in a generation...
...Just Like at Home, the latest feature by this talented Hungarian director, found a distributor much more quickly...
...Suddenly, her preadolescent nudity restores her innocence...
...While she is washing her face, he joins her in the bathroom...
...the sound of a jet plane is heard overhead...
...Nowicki is every bit as good as he was in Women...
...The characters in Just Like at Home are motivated by thoughts and feelings that are often as mysterious to them as they are to the audience...
...He learns that his irregular conduct during his fellowship has cost him a job at the university, and he receives a summons—without explanation—from the police...
...Mesza-ros' staging, Lajos Koltai's cinematography and Ildiko Korody's subtle screenplay capture all the nuances of the couple's brief and strained reunion —from the instant intimacy to the awkward banter and artificial levity of old lovers whose bonds have been eroded by time and distance...
...They seem to react spontaneously to their situations, not to some preconceived plot logic set down by a scriptwriter...
...At first, Andras pretends not to notice her altered appearance, but then he orders her to scrub off the makeup...
...But the film, directed by George Roy Hill (TheSting, Butch Cos-sidy and the Sundance Kid) from a novel by Patrick Cauvin, is a downright simple-minded adult's fantasy of young love...
...The attention she pays to revealing details has not diminished, though...
...Meszaros shuns overstylized direction...
...The combined pressures prompt another retreat to the world of his youth...
...Instead of emphasizing its peculiarity, Meszaros stages all except one of their scenes together as perfectly innocent...
...Andras is, therefore, not the typical victim of realism: The source of his undoing is the very freedom that he exercises in his impulsive shuttling between city and country, and in his rash assumption of responsibilities—for a former lover, a dog, or a child—that he cannot shoulder...
...in a few brief moments, Meszaros captures the pathetic loneliness of an intelligent, attractive woman trapped in the idiocy of village life with considerably less well-educated men and their suspicious wives, girl friends and mothers...
...Recalling Women, this movie begins as a realistic examination of the small emotions and minor occurrences that shape a relationship...
...Andras announces—to no one in particular, amid the emotional confusion he has created for everyone—"Now it's just like at home...
...Zsu-zsi, I'd like to talk," Anna says, addressing the child "woman to woman" and immediately putting her on the defensive...
...Andras impulsively visits his parents in the countryside and is plunged into the rural life he had abandoned many years before, first for Budapest and subsequently for the U.S...
...one hopes it will enjoy a wanner reception as well, for it is an even more striking work of art...
...And Czinkoczy, another alumnus of Women, will clearly be a major star in the very near future—if her career is allowed to develop in her homeland...
...at 13,1 never knew, heard of, or even dreamed of a girl my age who was beautiful, witty, adventurous, resourceful, romantic, and capable of understanding the works of Martin Heidegger...
...Just Like at Home is the most demanding movie I have seen since Claude Goretta's The Lacemaker...
...Three things redeem this foolishness...
...Andras' freedom finds its perfect expression in the director's liberation from the naturalistic conventions that served her so well in Women...
...fact, the single American child actress who comes close to Czinkoczy is 13-year-old Diane Lane in A Little Romance...
...The country, however, soon seems gloomy and oppressive, and he again moves to Budapest—with a small dog and a young girl, Zsuzsi (Zuszsa Czin-koczy), in tow...
...He is a wise-cracking street kid whose unlikely fondness for American movies (especially The Sting and Butch Cassidy) is exceeded only by his impossible precocity...
...In fact, with her parents' consent, Andras has even arranged for the little girl to live with him in Budapest...
...Two 13-year-olds—Lauren (Lane) and Daniel (Thelonious Bernard)—"meet cute" in Paris, encounter considerable parental disapproval, befriend quite a number of eccentric characters (including a charming old con man, played by Laurence Olivier), and engage in a series of improbable adventures that culminate in a romantic embrace in a gondola in Venice...
...the girl, whose mother sold the animal to him, has followed him to demand that it be returned to her and that he drive both of them back home...
...The idyll is undone when Anna arrives...
...Compared to this Hungarian actress, Tatum O'Neal and Brooke Shields are— well, just kids...
...Or note Andras' gift to Anna when he first returns from abroad—a big batch of American cigarettes, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag bearing the legend, "Unique Boutique—Wrangler...
...A female agronomist, for example, desperately offers herself to Andras after an evening on the collective farm...
...Then—in a departure from Women —Meszaros abruptly opens up the film, allowing the camera and the characters uncharacteristic sweep and freedom of expression...
...The dog is part of the countryside that he wants to take with him to the city...
...Trying to regain his affections, she finds that Zsuzsi has in some strange way taken her place...
...Anna knocks in vain at the door...
...perhaps only a loveable old curmudgeon is harder to portray than a loveably obnoxious kid...
...Since the script is so silly and the director is better known for his engineering of pleasant entertainments than his talented handling of performers, I'm inclined to believe that Bernard could have a future in this business...
...It is, rather, his own self, or lack of it...
...Anna's jealous intervention contributes to Zsuzsi's insecurity, and neither female is able to overcome Andras' inability to call anyplace home...
...Shortly thereafter, Zsuzsi casually reappears in eye shadow and lipstick, with her hair wantonly piled atop her head...
...Anna visits Andras, and the spectacle of their lovemaking drives the little girl out of the house...
...Finally, listen to the tension that crackles like static between the lines of dialogue as Anna and Zsu-zsi fence for Andras' attention...
...he and his young friend work in the fields, walk and swim together, and Meszaros slows the tempo to match his new-found tranquility...
...The impact of this and other scenes largely results from Meszaros' forging a new style of directing actors—somewhere between the staginess of naturalism and the equally artifical contrivance of improvisation...
...moments later, she is bent over in the bathtub, naked, as he shampoos her hair as he would a dog's...
...The first, surprisingly, is Hill's direction, which never condescends to the material...
...With that remark, the film ends...
...Unfortunately, the city does nothing to assuage Andras' sense of dislocation...
...To watch her in A Little Romance is to witness the birth of a star...
...Both have difficult roles...
...The one exception to this restraint is thus genuinely shocking by contrast...
...when it finally opened in Manhattan last fall, both critics and audiences were indifferent...
...That began as a study of the class tensions jeopardizing a relationship, and ended as a harrowing portrait of a young woman estranged from love and from life itself...
...Karina displays abilities that were never apparent in any of the many films she made with Jean-Luc Godard, her former husband...
...Similarly, in Home the plot and character elements are at first realistic...
...she is the daughter of the kind of wealthy and indulgent American expatriates in Paris who are found exclusively in (American) films...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 10
