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Longing and Lies:
Makk Károly's
Love
(Szerelem) [1971]
An
elderly woman is nearing death. Her
daughter-in-law, bearing flowers, gifts, and (most importantly)
conversation, visits daily. The
son/husband is notably absent. The
elderly woman entertains the younger with stories from days
past. When the elderly woman receives the rare
letter from her son, she feverishly reads from them, first
silently and then aloud to her daughter-in-law, until the already
weak and ill woman is exhausted.
The crux of the film by Makk Károly, based on the Déry Tíbor short story of the same title, is that the son/husband is not off shooting his film in New York, as his mother reads in “his” letters. He is in a Hungarian prison serving a ten-year sentence for political activity. The letters are the daughter-in-law’s fabrications to keep the truth from her husband’s ailing mother and to keep the mother’s hope—and therefore, body—alive. The lies she writes in the letters ironically reveal her love for the old woman, and through this act of loyalty, her love for her husband as well.
Although
the daughter-in law, brilliantly played by Töröcsik
Mari, constantly reassures her mother-in-law that “the
Professor [doctor] says you’ll live to see a hundred,” it
is clear that they both know her life will not last much longer. The
crucial difference is that Mari
[1]
knows that her mother-in-law, portrayed by Hungarian film
legend Darvas Lili, will never see her son again, while Lili holds out with
the hope that he will return in time.
Mari demands,
seemingly over and over again, the story of when Lili, her
husband, and two sons were away on holiday in a one-room bungalow. In
Lili’s hesitating narrative, as a young mother and wife,
she tells her sons to turn away while she changes her clothes. The
older son peeks, while János (Mari’s husband)
obediently faced the wall. The
older son meets death at an early age in the Second World War,
while János survives and must stoically face the wall
of communism. While
the film makes explicit that Mari is deceiving Lili for her
own good, it is unclear how many of the lies are believed. Similarly, the stories that Lili tells are uncertain and the
viewer begins to wonder as to the veracity of these tales as
well. The reassuringly lovely stories of the
past are juxtaposed next to the ridiculously obvious falsehoods
of the “letters from abroad” that Mari pretends
have just arrived with the morning post.
Lili’s
house and imagination are windows on the past and Mari’s
flat, which eventually receives “co-tenents,” represents
the restrictive, and ever-narrowing present. Throughout the first portion of the film
in Lili’s comfortable and fairly large home, the action
is interspersed with still shots of photos and antiques. The
static nature of the still shots lends a slowness and beauty
to the objects, but the technique also endows the fragments
of memory with a coldness that negates any sense of life. They
echo Lili’s seemingly rich life and yet they whisper
of emptiness as well. This
vivid, if ambiguous, representation of the old woman’s
life stands in direct contrast to the growing brutally bleak
atmosphere of Mari’s present life, which is devoid of
beauty. The cold
bleak scenes after Lili’s death are almost entirely without
dialogue. All stories and all memories seem to
have died. Mari
and János will live on together, but the future is uncertain.
[1] Since the characters’ names are never used (with the exception of “János,” the husband/son played by Darvas Iván), I will use the actors’ names Mari and Lili when referring to the characters of the wife and mother, respectively. I follow the Hungarian system of family name first, followed by given name.