Jemima
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
William J. Fickling
Imbd has not listed (at least not yet) this Hungarian film under its US release title of "Down by Love." It's playing for just one week at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills, which is too bad because it will probably be missed by 99.99% of the viewing public, even that tiny minority which is friendly to obscure foreign films.As an earlier reviewer said, for nearly the entire film there is only one character on the screen, the tragic and tortured young woman Eva, excellently played by Patricia Kovacs. This doesn't mean that it's a monologue, because Eva spends a lot of time on the phone, or talking to people through her apartment door opened to the length of the key chain, or replaying old dialogues and other experiences in her head. At first I groaned inwardly, because the film deals with a quite hackneyed theme, a young woman in obsessive love with her much older married lover, who of course treats her like dirt. However, this relationship is far more sinister than it first appears; I can't reveal how without being guilty of writing a spoiler. This doesn't become really clear until over halfway through the film, and we realize this by piecing together random facts thrown at us through various bits of dialogue thrown at us, as well as from her internal monologues.At the end of the film, quite by accident, she finally realizes what a treacherous bastard her lover is and decides to exact her revenge. How she does this I won't tell you, on the outside chance that you might see this film. If you can't get to see the film and really want to know how it ends, you can send me a private e-mail.Chances are you won't be able to see this excellent film in the US if you don't live in New York, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco. Maybe it will appear some day on the Sundance or Independent Film Channels. This tells you more than you need to know, if you don't already, about the film distribution system in this country.
Olvaso
Extremely intelligent drama about a very young woman and her middle-aged lover. The scene is an apartment for the whole movie, there is mostly only one person here, and the second human face is seen only at the end of the story. But the movie is not boring at all, the tension is greater and greater as the heroine fights with her past, with her dreams, with her absurd situation. This is a tragic movie about the love of a woman and about the total selfish attitude of a man, who has his wife, home, family -- and wants to keep his young lover too.
