Pal Hetenyi Movies

Mitzi (Hanna Schygulla) turns to Sandor (Marcello Mastroianni) for help when her husband is murdered by right-wing extremists looking for a cache of diamonds. She and her young son escape with Sandor to Italy. By the 1930s, they return to Budapest to run the successful Arizona Club, a posh watering hole for the social elite. Mitzi falls for an American journalist, her son falls for a woman with ties to high-ranking Nazis, and Sandor is questioned about his Jewish heritage. The son learns he is half Jewish as the Nazi round-up and deportation begin. Uneven editing in places suggests that a lot of film ended up on the cutting-room floor. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Possibly inspired by the existential play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, this story about five people living in close quarters in a small apartment conveys the same angst as Sartre's well-known story about the nature of hell. Like the 1962 movie version of the play, Oszi Almanach is also garishly lighted, with scenes red-tinted on one side and blue-tinted on the other. Close-ups show a dermatologist's interest in skin, an example of the kind of bizarre abstraction that underscores the alienation in this film. A single, older mother owns the apartment, where she is tended by a nurse who has brought along a presumed lover. The sick woman's son lives there too, constantly thinking about how to get his hands on his mother's money. The last member of this unhappy "family" is a former teacher now down on his luck and out of work. The three men and the nurse are dependent on the sick woman, on her money and her apartment, just as she is dependent on them. Yet these individuals are two-faced, scheming, and prone to anger. Unable to break away and leave, at the same time they find no solace in staying -- making a difficult two hours of misery for the average viewer to take on without a therapist. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

This film seems to be saying that even when you try hard, things may still not work out. Julia (Juli Basti) works in a factory but has taken it upon herself to check in with different people to make sure everything is going well for them. To that end, she comes up to a house where two older girls and a little boy are left alone for long periods of time because Arpad (Jan Nowicki) their father has to work late. When Juli talks to the father he agrees to let her move in because the children need a mother, and she still continues with her work in the factory. Soon Juli and Arpad have developed a romantic attachment, but he has an alcohol problem which is probably at the source of some troubles at work that land him in jail. When he gets out, he is arrested again for political reasons. Meanwhile, Juli has decided to move out, and she becomes seriously ill and ends up in the hospital. All told, the future seems to hold no good tidings for either Juli or Arpad, much less the hapless children. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In The Father (Apa), Hungarian filmmaker Istvan Szabo invests a great deal of poetry and warmth in a story that, in lesser hands, might have become a wallow in bathos. After his father is killed in World War II, a young Hungarian boy named Tako concocts a fantasy image of the parent he never really knew. Convincing himself of his father's unstinting bravery, the boy grows into a man (Andras Balint) who hopes to emulate his dad's heroism. During the 1956 uprising, our hero falls in love with Jewish refugee Anni (Kati Solyom). Apprised of the horrors experienced by Anni's people during the Holocaust, Tako decides to find out whether or not his father was truly the noble warrior he's imagined him to be. It turns out that the father was neither wholly good nor wholly evil, just an average Hungarian hoping to make the best of a difficult world. At long last, Tako is able to divest himself of his father's shadow and become a man on his own terms. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi