Erika Marozsán, I mean, the actress who plays the role of Ilona, a waitress in an elegant Budapest restaurant in the years just before and during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. I don't often feel that it's entirely good manners to rhapsodize about a woman's beauty, and it's rarely a determining factor in my appreciation of a serious film. But Ilona's drop-dead beauty combines with her simplicity and vulnerability to make the romance of "Gloomy Sunday" plausible. Ilona has two lovers, the first her ordinary-looking mild-mannered boss and the second the moodily handsome piano player at the restaurant. Some conflict occurs, some jealousy, some rejections, but inevitably the two men accept that Ilona "needs both" of them. The boss says it: "half an Ilona is better than no Ilona at all."
It might seem that "Gloomy Sunday" begins as a remake of "Jules et Jim", a film about a beautiful love-triangle, bound to have a heart-breaking finish. And so it will, but not before the film transforms into a remake of "Schindler's List" with a bitterly ironic reversal. The Schindler-prototype is a young German who comes to the restaurant before the outbreak of the War, falls in love with Ilona, attempts suicide when she gently refuses him, is rescued by Lazlo, the restauranteur, and reappears with the Wehrmacht as a major officer in the Occupation. That role is performed by Ben Becker, an Oscar-worthy performance as a man torn between halting sensitivity and bottomless corruption. That this brutal characterization of a German "soul" could be offered, in a German film with a German director, should not go unapplauded.
Lazlo is a Jew, a fact that hadn't weighed on his mind before the onslaught of the Nazi 'Final Solution'. His restaurant serves pork and stays open on the Sabbath. Lazlo is above all a "Mensch", a German word that in Yiddish describes a person with a big heart. The pianist, András, is Hungarian, a composer who regards himself as a failure until he writes a single song without lyrics, Gloomy Sunday, which becomes an international hit, making him and Lazlo's restaurant both famous. Lazlo is played by Joachim Krol and András by Stefano Dionisi; both are superlative in their roles.
Erika/Ilona is beautiful, Budapest is beautiful (it really is; I've been there), the cinematography is gorgeous, the song is haunting, and the romance is heart-breakingly beautiful, too. It's almost a dilemma of 'cognitive dissonance' that such a beautiful film should portray such intolerably vile and tragic realities. It's the dissonance between beauty and calamity which András expresses in his music yet can't express in words.
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Top reviews from other countries
Stuart Wakerley
A must for your collection!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2017
Alexander Andreska
WAHRE GEFÜHLE FÜR ECHTE EMPFINDUNGEN
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Jamais c'est une version officielle - pleine des fauts d'ortographe dans la couverture - Piraté?
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