Lajos Balázsovits

Synopsis: An aspiring film student is denied a scholarship to the state-funded university when his father is thrown in jail. The man had stopped a train in order to facilitate the union between two old friends. The son then takes a job as a land surveyor and meets a Greek man who works towards the collective benefits of the peasants. The man is killed in a peasant uprising prompted by a bureaucratic boondoggle. The surveyor looks after the man’s widow as his emerging political and social awareness leads him take a stand against government injustice. Another incident, in which gypsies are rounded up by state hygiene workers, further galvanizes the man’s beliefs. He photographs the incident, and his work allows him to be accepted into the school from which he was previously denied admission.Read More »

After her husband dies, a woman questions her love for her husband and whether or not to accept money from the insurance policy. Tensions mount when her estranged son returns to the familial home with his girlfriend.Read More »

Holdudvar (1969)

A woman attends the funeral of her husband after he dies in an airplane crash. She returns home and begins to have feelings of ambivalent emptiness and decides she never really loved him. She contemplates refusing a government insurance policy taken out on her late spouse, a respected scientist. Her son returns home with the girlfriend that prompted his earlier estrangement from the family. The bereaved widow accepts the son and his girlfriend in a conciliatory gesture. When the son discovers his mother may turn down the money, he drugs her and she is imprisoned in a country house. The mother and the girl soon realize the boy may be just like his opportunistic and uncaring father, as both women view the son in a different light. Both women come to the realization that there is life beyond what a man may dictate in this inspiring film of female liberation.Read More »

Quote:
Tibetan yogi Milarepa is one of the main teachers of Buddhism. His autobiography is filmed here parallel with a story of a youth of our days, both seeking answers to same questions. They have masters whose decisions they don’t fully catch, and there are women whose roles are ambiguous. Master and disciple depend in each other, in fierce search for truth; only belief and honor count. Cavani made an extraordinary movie which has not lost any of its charm within years. It is a meditation of man’s destiny and also a narrative of the parallel but non- tangential lives of man and woman. This film can be read as a visual philosophical tract and an homage to Milarepa. Aside of that, the film is very beautiful visually and the great actors fully contribute to the ideas of both Milarepa and Cavani.
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