This is the first film I've seen by Hungarian director Marla Meszaros. I had seen recently Miklos Jancso's excellent The Round Up and Istvan Szabo's Father and Mephisto, so I was basically going on a binge (for lack of a better word) of Hungarian films. While not as impressive as the other Hungarian films I'd seen, it still stands head and shoulders above your average Hollywood film.
The film centers around a young working class girl in Communist Hungary in the early 1970's. She has recently broken up with her brutal boyfriend and finds herself at the local University dancing with all of the college students. As chance would have it she meets a young man and they both fall in love. She lies to him at first about her job and tells him she is actually a college student as well. He forgives her and they try to forge a lasting relationship despite there differences. There's a terrific scene where presumably she's sitting in her boyfriend's dorm room looking bored while he's doing homework. She decides to turn on the record player and some classical music (I believe) that was used in the silent version Phantom of Opera. Her boyfriend quickly gets annoyed because he can't study and turns down the music. She immediately turns it back up, he turns it down again, then she turns it back up once again. He hesitates to turn it down again and just stares away from her. Absolutely no dialogue is spoken in this scene and it's perfectly clear just how different these two really are. I don't want to give away the rest of the film but things do get a little hectic for the hopeful couple.
Overall though, I enjoyed the film, especially some of the cinematography. Although I couldn't help thinking that for the most part this is a fairly conventional love story about two people who were never met to be and somehow find each other. I definetely wouldn't call it amazing, but, if you're into Hungarian or East European cinema, I suggest you see this film at some point. Although I would recommend seeing Szabo's brilliant Father (1968) or Jancso's The Round Up (1965) first.
