ANGI VERA Movie Review

In 1948 Hungary, during the early and increasingly dehumanizing days of socialism, a young woman who is deeply committed to the cause finds herself falling in love with the charming—and married—group leader of her Party “re-education” school. Veronika Papp's Angi is one of the most memorable and convincing characters to come out of the great wave of Eastern European cinema of the 1970s. Her dilemma is hardly unique to her time or place, yet her solution to that dilemma—revealed in an unexpected climax that still packs a wallop—represents a quietly revolutionary but genuinely revelatory intersecting of sex and politics. Director Pál Gábor's film is a graceful, entertaining and haunting love story that received great critical acclaim when it appeared on the international film festival circuit, yet received such limited release here that it failed to reach the crossover audience that it deserved. A glittering, beguiling, and ultimately devastating little gem, Angi Vera is ripe for rediscovery.

NEXT STOP … Tito and Me, When Father Was Away on Business, My Twentieth Century

1978 96m/C HU Veronika Papp, Erszi Pasztor, Eva Szabo, Tamas Dunai, Laszlo Horvath; D: Pal Gabor; W: Pal Gabor; C: Lajos Koltai; M: Gyorgy Selmeczi. VHS NO