Love ‘Szerelem’ remains one of the most important and acclaimed films in Hungarian cinema history; not only did it win the Jury Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, but it also proved to be a significant influence on the poetic and aesthetic film styles of 1970s Hungarian cinema, with its unique way of telling a story through the characters’ subjective trains of thought. Károly Makk’s Love ‘Szerelem’ is currently unavailable in the United Kingdom.
The 1970s produced some of the most notable and critically acclaimed Hungarian films, including Szindbád (1971) by Zoltán Huszárik, Red Psalm (1972) by Miklós Jancsó, The Fifth Seal (1976) by Zoltán Fábri, and even Béla Tarr’s directorial debut, Family Nest (1979). However, Károly Makk’s Love ‘Szerelem‘ (1971) may best encapsulate the transition from the socially aware new wave of the 1960s to the more unconventional, avant-garde films of the 1970s, creating a perfect synthesis of both styles.
The film’s construction of time and place is remarkable. First, it establishes a lyrical, poetic mood through montages, where still shots appear on screen, sometimes for only a few frames, to evoke the characters’ memories and subconscious emotional associations. This deepens and expands the otherwise straightforward plot uniquely, using the power of images rather than words. Second, the story’s historical moment is depicted unconventionally, without ever explicitly stating the decade or year. At the same time, numerous subtle clues and references are scattered in the background, signalling subtle political messages to an audience familiar with recent Hungarian history.
The film is based on two short stories by Tibor Déry: Szerelem (Love, 1956) and Két Asszony (Two Women, 1962). Déry is an acclaimed Hungarian author whom literary historian György Lukács praised as “the greatest depicter of human beings of our time”. However, the film’s status as a masterpiece owes as much to its execution as to its source material.
The plot seems simplistic on the surface, as we spend much of the runtime in one room with a bedridden old lady (Lili Darvas) and her daughter-in-law, Luca (Mari Törőcsik). The two women bond over the absence of Janos (Ivan Darvas), the old lady’s son and Luca’s husband. Ostensibly, both Luca and the old lady are cynical and petty, constantly bickering over the smallest things. Yet the film’s stylistic and formal choices express their deeper emotional concerns.
While the old lady languishes in bed obsessively awaiting her son’s return, she reads letters, apparently by Janos, claiming he works as a film director in New York and cannot come home until his latest project is completed. However, Luca writes the fake letters, impersonating Janos, who has been imprisoned for ten years for political reasons. Luca has maintained this lie for some time, detailing Janos’s extraordinary successes and overseas adventures to try to spare the old lady the harsh possibility that her son will never return.
The story is filtered through the main characters’ feelings and memories. As the two women talk, fragmented snippets of the old lady’s thoughts interrupt their lengthy dialogue, presented as still images spliced into the film in a jarring, arrhythmic manner. This, however, does not suggest that the old lady is losing her sense of reality or cannot distinguish between past and present; rather, these images represent the associations her current conversation with Luca evokes in her memories. These include seemingly random, minor episodes, such as her past love or the proper way to tie a ribbon around large hats in fashion during her youth.
“Mr Makk’s career prospects are bright. This summer, he will be in Italy directing a West. German production, but he is confident of backing for his next feature here as well. “Obviously,” he said smilingly, “after a success, it’s easy to get support for the next project. The hard part now is to keep up with what they expect from you.”
New York Times – March 4th 1971
Another significant memory Luca continuously asks the old lady to recall is a holiday to the countryside with her two sons. Here, Janos and his little brother were asked to face the wall and not peek while their mother undressed. These fragmented memory snippets serve as a character study of young Janos, who, unlike his little brother, obeyed his parents’ wish and kept his eyes on the wall; however, they also operate on another narrative level. Instead of a usual flashback sequence that objectively portrays a past event, the fractured images tell us of unspoken pain and trauma. When she mentions her younger son, the countryside memories are suddenly disturbed by a picture of a bomb exploding. The plot never offers explanations; however, it raises the question of whether the younger son died in the war. Is that why the old lady’s memories of him are unwillingly interrupted by this violent image?
The audience is left to interpret these memory fragments. The film provides no definitive information to help us piece together these disparate references, so viewers can construct their own narrative from what they see. Whilst the old lady goes through the fake letters that Luca has written, she imagines Janos’ life as a film director in New York, and we get a similar dizzying array of images. Until this point, the brief flashing shots referred to events that had definitely, objectively happened in the past, even though they were presented in a surrealistic manner.
However, the kaleidoscope of associations that the letter gives us is pure fantasy, concocted by Luca and elaborated upon within the old lady’s mind. Here, Makk emphasises this distinction stylistically. The montage sequence of Janos’ New York life is constructed from archaic, mostly still images: people from the turn of the century in old-fashioned clothes, obsolete interior decorations, and vehicles long out of production. This confirms the mythical status of the situation, as the old lady clearly has no clear idea of contemporary New York lifestyle and fashion, relying on memories of a place she has only seen in pictures from her younger years.
At several points, these distorted images of a fabricated New York life are interrupted by much more realistic shots of a prison. It is unclear whose mind’s eye conjures them, so the question arises: is Luca envisioning her husband’s true fate while she feeds his mother a fantasy? Or do these images belong to the old lady, who is actually aware of the sham and keeps pretending to believe the letter? The ambiguity remains unresolved, and we are never quite sure who is protecting whom.
The old lady’s imagination is filled with highly adorned, Secession-style pictures dating from the Belle Époque, a golden age in Hungarian history. Luca’s memories are portrayed with a starker, more bare naturalism. When we see unambiguous images of her thoughts in scenes with no other main characters around, they portray only the terror of contemporary life in the early 1950s. For instance, on her way home, the tram conductor’s bell ringing evokes in Luca’s mind the image of her husband being taken away in the middle of the night by the secret police. A noticeable generational and historical gap separates these two women, manifesting in their inner lives as much as in their outer behaviour.
In the first half of the film, we are presented with numerous close-ups, mostly fragmented images of objects in the old lady’s small and cluttered bedroom, which forces us to slowly piece together the outline of the location without any establishing shots. Here, we are introduced to the knick-knacks, trinkets and ornaments the old lady has collected throughout the decades. These close-ups, including a half-eaten apple, evoke still-life paintings, existing outside the flow of time.
The film paints this location through the atmosphere of a bygone era, carrying traces of the past, before the war and Soviet takeover. This also parallels the portrayal of Luca’s flat, a bland, utilitarian environment, very much of the present. We spend little time there, and the flat becomes an impersonal, neutral, bleak place that holds no happy memories for its tenants.
In the film’s final third, the focus shifts to Janos, who is released from prison quickly and without explanation; the flashing images remain. However, their meaning changes. They no longer represent slowly emerging subjective flashbacks or fragmented, rambling associations. Instead, they connect the past and the present, portraying the various locations in Budapest and seemingly insignificant objects that evoke memories as he returns to society. This technique captures the freed man’s shock at returning to civilisation just hours before living under the weight of a possible trip to the gallows.
This marks a distinct tonal and geographical shift. The film is no longer a chamber piece, mostly confined to a handful of rooms punctuated by brief flurries of memory; from this point on, a continuous stream of images and associations drives the plot as Janos makes his way through the city.
Just as our character’s inner thoughts require audience effort, we are forced to deduce the story’s era in much the same way. Although made in 1971, the narrative’s decade or year is never explicitly stated. On the one hand, this technique helps the film become a universal work that portrays human interdependence in the broadest sense, placing the themes beyond time, space, and culture. However, numerous fleeting moments and subtle background references, once pieced together, help define the story within an easily identifiable historical and political era.
Many small, seemingly insignificant moments serve as clues once you’re familiar with 20th-century Hungarian history. Piecing them together makes it clear the film is set in the early 1950s. For instance, as she tries to make ends meet, Luca mentions she has been fired from her job as a teacher. While it is never stated, it is clear she was seen as untrustworthy and stigmatised due to her husband being a political prisoner – a situation that many people fell victim to in the early 1950s. The authorities also asked her to share her tiny flat with co-tenants. Mandatory co-tenancy was a new law in Hungary between 1945 and 1956 to address the post-war housing crisis. It required people to share their homes with strangers if the floor space was considered too big for the original number of people already living there.
Political restrictions on the arts partly shaped the story’s setting. Censorship in Hungary wouldn’t allow specific topics to be portrayed on screen, and a few years previously, it would have been impossible to tell a story about a political prisoner. However, by the 1970s, things had become more lenient, and the film’s focus on personal relationships and memories allowed it to avoid government scrutiny.
Nevertheless, the filmmakers had to make certain concessions. In one of the short stories the film is based on, Janos was a political prisoner who participated in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. However, in 1971, less than 20 years after the actual events, any mention of the uprising was taboo. Therefore, Janos’s backstory had to change: he became a victim of the State Protection Authority, an external appendage of the Soviet Union’s secret police that operated in the early 1950s. This aligns with the pre-1956 dark-era narrative endorsed by the 1970s government, where portraying events from that time in a negative light was not only acceptable but also welcome.
Although the film takes place in the early 50s, Janos’s imprisonment carries a heavy subtext. The actor portraying him, Ivan Darvas, had been sentenced to 22 months in prison for organising a revolutionary committee after the crushing of the 1956 uprising. As was public knowledge at the time of the film’s release, the choice of actor feels like a deliberate directorial decision to subtly imply that the terror we see in the movie was not confined to the specific era the government allowed to be portrayed.
Love ‘Szerelem‘ remains one of the most important and acclaimed films in Hungarian cinema history; not only did it win the Jury Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, but it also proved to be a significant influence on the poetic and aesthetic film styles of 1970s Hungarian cinema, with its unique way of telling a story through the characters’ subjective trains of thought. The film balances the problems of three specific people with a universal story. It does so by focusing on feelings, love, affection and the lack thereof.
Meanwhile, politics stays in the background. Yet beneath the surface, we see the film take a stand, condemning both contemporary Hungarian governments and those of the eras it depicts. The film’s issues and emotions are universal, regardless of culture, nationality, or political views.
Love ‘Szerelem‘ begins as a dialogue-driven piece that gradually shifts to a finale where body language, gestures, and looks take precedence over the spoken words. This underscores Luca and Janos’s feelings for one another, transcending what mere speech can articulate. Here, Love ‘Szerelem‘ is a testament to cinema’s ability to convey our most profound and intimate emotions.
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