A HENTES, A KURVA ÉS A FÉLSZEMŰ

The collapse of the communist Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 is followed by the White Terror, the consolidation of power under Miklós Horthy and, for nationalists, the Trianon trauma. This peace treaty lost Hungary almost two thirds of its previous territory. Gusztav Léderer, a former soldier and notorious murderer of communists and Jews, is given a dishonourable discharge from the army in Budapest in 1925. His superior advises suicide. But Léderer meets the former prostitute Maria and with her flees to a small village where the patriarch and meat merchant Ferenc Kodelka calls the shots. Both men know each other from former times and now compete for Maria who keeps on upping her price.

The title of this dark love triangle drama by János Szász could well be "Chronicle of a Murder Foretold". After WOYZECK, he and cameraman Tibor Máthé have again created an elegiac black-and-white film with exquisite images, the harshness and beauty of which contrast with the brutal, increasingly revolting acts of the protagonists. He thus achieves an equally grim and shocking portrait of society about the desire to kill, meat and carnal lust in still feudal, corrupt, authoritarian Hungary. Certain parallels to the present are undeniable. JT