APRÓ MESÉK

Balázs is a somewhat different kind of war profiteer. The handsome young man exploits the post-war chaos in Hungary. He studies the advertisements by parents, wives and war widows, introduces himself to them as the missing or dead man’s best mate and tells colourful tales of the missing man’s putative heroism. That works well until he is caught with a lie and is forced to leave Budapest for a while. In the provinces he gets to know Judit and her son; at first he plays his usual role and then becomes the young mother’s lover. But one day, her husband returns from war captivity. He is a thug and war criminal. But who now has the better contacts to the new occupiers, the Soviets, and to the Hungarian communists?

The film breaks free from its comfortable crime genre especially when opportunists offer their services to the new incumbents of power and no justice is done to the victims. Then TALL TALES transforms into a parable of the contradictory post-war period in once increasingly fascist and suddenly communist Hungary, oscillating between comedy, love story, crime thriller and film noir. JT