Film
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz Remembering in Hungary Each one of us is formed by our childhood and past. At the time when my country's new society was in its childhood, I was a child too. Once an adult,...
...In the film's final scene, set in 1953, the son and Juli have finally obtained permission to visit Janos in prison...
...Meszaros's sculptor father disappeared in Stalin's purge of intellectuals, and her mother died during the war...
...Marta Meszaros In her reverberant Diary for My Children, Marta Meszaros (Nine Months, Women) draws deeply from her memories of youth in Stalinist Hungary, confronting her childhood and the history of a new society...
...Magda is not portrayed as a Stalinist monster, but as a complex character with whom one can, at moments, sympathize...
...American independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has realized a work that is cinematically original—every scene is shot in a single, continuous take infused with laid-back wit...
...Once an adult, each of us must face up to our past and childhood...
...Their battle dramatizes the perceptions articulated most notably by Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting...
...Magda attempts to ingratiate herself with Juli, holding out perks like carrots—a large house of conspicuously bourgeois sumptuousness, admission to an elite school...
...Though many films from Eastern Europe express their politics allusively, Diary for My Children makes its point clearly and artfully...
...Custody of the girl is assumed by Magda, a former member of the revolutionary underground, now a Communist Party stalwart and important newspaper editor...
...Juli demands an explanation of her father's death, but receives from Magda only an opaque pronouncement on "historical necessity...
...The principal narrative, shot in somber black and white, appears among newsreel footage from the period into which the characters are inserted Zelig-like...
...M Choose Me Generally appealing romantic comedy, written and directed by Alan Rudolph, depicting the essential loneliness, furtive amatory impulses, and emotional confusion of five interrelated characters...
...Magda wants to obliterate the memory of Juli's parents...
...Diary for My Children begins in 1947 as Juli, the film's truculent fourteen-year-old protagonist, returns to Budapest...
...These "real" events are, in turn, countered by the idyllic fantasies of Juli's dreams and the escapist visions she witnesses at the movies...
...From this experience, Meszaros has drawn a masterpiece—what may be the best motion picture of 1984...
...Her family journeyed to the Soviet Union in 1936...
...The film is further enriched by the suggestive interweaving of varied images...
...The girl finds escape in the movies, where she sees alternative role models on the screen, and in soft-focus dreams of her parents...
...I don't like being stroked," Juli explains...
...Stranger than Paradise is more memorable in its imagery and evocation of mood than any recent product of Hollywood...
...She moves in with Janos and his crippled son, but her childhood nightmare comes full circle as she awakens one morning from a dream of her father to find trench-coated police hauling Janos off to prison...
...Filmmaker Meszaros does not deliver Diary for My Children in a neat and tidy package...
...She has devoted her life to the Party but still longs for the warmth of family, and would like to adopt the orphaned girl...
...It's a struggle for control of memory and possession of the past...
...But Juli defiantly maintains that she does not remember Magda from before the war, and she recoils from Magda's touch...
...Through a double set of bars, the now graying Janos asks them what they have been doing...
...And Juli, in her sullenness, seems unattractive at times...
...Nothing much," comes the reply, "we're waiting for you...
...Juli's desire for a link with her past (and for a more hopeful future) leads her to Janos, an independent-minded engineer played by Jan Nowicki, who also depicts the sculptor father of Juli's dreams...
...Some critics have faulted the film for the apparent shallowness of its characterization, but it seems to me that this group portrait of muddled and self-deluded types reflects more than a little contemporary reality...
...The struggle between Juli and Magda, it becomes increasingly clear, has a political as well as a personal dimension...
...Stranger than Paradise The sleeper of the year—a low-budget, post-punk road picture that follows the wanderings of three hilariously disaffected characters...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
