Father
A lyrical coming-of-age drama spiced with fantasy interludes, Hungarian auteur István Szabó’s charming second feature takes place in postwar Budapest. Growing up fatherless, Takó (Dániel Erdély) dreams up romantic stories about his late dad’s heroic exploits, but the older Takó (András Bálint) reassesses his views on fatherhood and the fatherland following his relationship with a Jewish girl and involvement with the bloody Hungarian uprising of 1956. Handsomely shot by cinematographer Sándor Sára, Father is a meditation on grief, love and national memory.
András Bálint, Miklós Gábor, Dániel Erdély
- Notes From Mike MillsFATHER is loosely based on Szabó’s own dad in World War II. It’s not afraid to just look at the smallest detail: They have a front gate with a metal ring on top of the post, and the son plays with it as he passes through. It’s a shot repeated a few times throughout the film—it’s a very banal but very personal shot that leaks out meaning and poignancy and truth in unpredictable ways. I feel like cinema is so good at helping us reexamine small, intimate but structural things like that—film can be so magic and uncanny in that way, when film language mimics subjective inner life.
