TIME STANDS STILL Movie Review

Megall Az Ido

In Budapest in the 1960s, two schoolboys are dogged by their classmates because a decade earlier the boys’ father fled Hungary for the promise of America. Branded “an enemy of the people,” the father unwittingly bequeathed a legacy to his children that turns out to be a social and political nightmare given the realities of Hungary's oppressive socialist regime. Péter Gothár's Time Stands Still shows us how living in a police state can pervert the simplest of relationships and the ordinary, day-to-day trials of school life. With its ironic, American pop soundtrack and stylized look, Time Stands Still is an expressionistic, Kafkaesque, out-of-time-and-space glimpse at some of the forgotten victims of political tyranny.

NEXT STOP … Tito and Me, Angi Vera, Institute Benjamenta

1982 99m/C HU Istvan Znamenak, Henrik Pauer, Aniko Ivan, Sander Soth, Peter Galfy; D: Peter Gothar; W: Peter Gothar; C: Lajos Koltai; M: Gyorgy Selmeczi. New York Film Critics Awards ‘82: Best Foreign Film. VHS COL