From Hungary to Los Angeles: a moving film 
 
This past weekend we watched a film which I would enthusiastically recommend.  It's called An American Rhapsody, directed by Éva Gárdos and released in 2001.  Neither Nancy nor I recall this being in the theatres, but since it was released less than a month before 9/11, the publicity surrounding the former may have been overwhelmed by media coverage of the latter.  The story revolves around a middle-class Hungarian family, Peter and Margit Sandor, forced to leave their native country in 1950, at the height of the Stalinist terror.  They succeed in escaping, but only by leaving their infant daughter Suzanne behind -- ostensibly only temporarily.  The mother, Margit, beautifully played by Nastassja Kinski, is persuaded to follow this plan only on condition that Suzanne will be smuggled out separately and brought to them days later in Vienna. However, when Margit's mother, with whom Suzanne was left, discovers that her grand-daughter will be drugged and put into a bag to keep her from crying and being heard at the border, she panics at the last moment and takes her back at the risk of her own life.  Indeed she herself is arrested, spending five years in prison, and little Suzanne is brought up by a foster family in the countryside.

Eventually, in 1955, the Sandors, now settled into a comfortable suburban life in southern California, succeed in getting Suzanne out of Hungary, but at the heart-breaking cost of severing her from the only family she has ever known.  The remainder of the film is a poignant look at the resulting tensions this creates at the centre of the family's life, as they grapple with Suzanne's sense that she is in the wrong place and does not really belong.

What I found so affecting about the film is that all of the main characters are sympathetic.  All of them do what they think is the right thing -- particularly what they believe to be in Suzanne's best interest -- yet all are powerless in the face of forces working against them, and this inevitably brings turmoil to a young life.  The plot is resolved at the end, but a sense of melancholy remains.  A bicycle never ridden.  The aching love of a childless peasant couple.  The inanities of 1960s youth culture.  A home lost and then found.

Two details in the film struck me as not true to the period.  First, the Sandors are shown sneaking across the border from Hungary into Austria and making their way to Vienna.  However, in 1950 Austria, like Germany, was under Allied occupation, with Soviet troops in the eastern part.  Like Berlin, Vienna itself was under four-power control.  (Remember The Third Man.)  Crossing into Austria would not have taken the Sandors out from behind the Iron Curtain -- not until 1955, when the Soviets withdrew from their sector.

Second, was steam still in use in the Hungarian railways in 1965?  A decade later when I was in Czechoslovakia, virtually all the railways there were by then electrified.  (I did, however, see a steam-powered train on a branch line in the countryside.)

These are small flaws in an otherwise great film. I should finally point out that the plot behind this film is based on Éva Gárdos' own life story. Suzanne is Gárdos. At the end she dedicates it to her own parents, which adds to the film's poignancy.