Five Hungarian Films Share a Melancholy Theme

All five films that conclude the UCLA Film Archive’s New Hungarian Cinema series this weekend in Melnitz Theater are extraordinary. They compose an exceedingly bleak and pessimistic portrait of life in Hungary over the past 40 years but are redeemed by an impassioned honesty and courage and absolutely splendid acting.

Ference Teglasy’s impressive feature debut film, “Never, Nowhere, to No One!” (Saturday at 5:30 p.m.), begins in Budapest, 1951, and focuses on one of the countless families which were evacuated at that time to the countryside on the vague charges of being “politically unreliable.” Settling in an abandoned schoolhouse, the family commences their bitter struggle for survival and acceptance by the area’s farmers. For the father (Andras Kozak) the great concern is that he find the courage to maintain his integrity as an example for his children. Theirs is an incredibly hard and unjust existence, relieved only by the random act of kindness and by the knowledge that so far they have escaped an even worse fate, which are the labor camps.

“Never, Nowhere, to No One!” (1988) is followed at 7:30 by Zsolt Kezdi-Kovacs’ “Cry and Cry Again” (1987), which is the most relentlessly dark of the five films. It is a love story, set in 1958, between a 40ish worker (Jerzy Trela) in a highly symbolic slaughterhouse and a beautiful young woman (Maria Varga) who works in the slaughterhouse’s personnel department. That their relationship is doomed from the start is so palpable you can all but taste the fear and paranoia enveloping it; both their spouses had managed to flee the country after the failure of the 1956 revolution. Unfortunately, the woman is in the cruel thrall of very man, now a government official, who stopped her at the border.

You might well consider skipping “Cry and Cry Again” for a dinner break and return at 9 for “Love, Mother,” (1986), the longest (2 hours, 45 minutes) but most accessible of the films. Written by Miklos Vamos and directed by Janos Rozsa, “Love, Mother” has such immediacy and universality that it could just as easily be set in suburban Los Angeles as suburban Budapest without changing a single detail.

It is a superbly orchestrated satire on the frantic, self-absorbed nature of contemporary life. The Kalmars are reeling out of control without realizing it. What little communication they have between each other is by leaving messages on a kitchen bulletin board. The father (Robert Koltai), an enterprising contractor, is so busy he can’t even work infidelity into his schedule satisfactorily, and the mother (Dorottya Udvaros) is a tour guide whose work takes her away from home for several days at a time. No one realizes that the bright adolescent son (Simon G. Gevai) has played hooky for the last three weeks. The one person concerned with what is happening to the family is the daughter (Kati Lajtai), a high school student, whose despair comes to a head when she finds it impossible to get through to her parents that her beloved grandmother has died. What is truest about this rich, satisfying film, is that it suggests that it’s unrealistic to expect that the lessons learned in crisis will have a truly lasting effect.

Written by Istvan Kardos and directed by Pal Erdoss, “Tolerance” (1986), which screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m., is an another unflinching contemporary drama, in which a dreamy young man (Denes Dobrei) and his wife (Erika Ozsda) both wind up in jail on petty offenses and discover how nearly impossible it will be for them to regain custody of their two young daughters. “Tolerance” suggests the state is as intent on destroying the family as it was more than 35 years earlier, as depicted in “Never, Nowhere, to No One!”

The major discovery of the series is the last film, Bela Tarr’s “Damnation” (1988). Working from the slightest of plots devised by himself and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Tarr’s fiercely demanding film is a triumph of sound and image in the manner of the late Andrei Tarkovsky (with a touch of David Lynch thrown in for good measure). Set in a desolate small town, it deals with the highly tentative and treacherous relationships of an existentialist outsider (Miklos B. Szekely) to the woman he loves, her husband, and a cynical bartender for whom the husband, at the outsider’s behest, goes on a smuggling mission. “Damnation” is one of those films in which nothing seems to happen yet everything has changed by the end. With its stark, moody black-and-white images it has more style and individuality than all the other films put together.

Information: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.