Director: László Nemes

Stars: Bojtorján Barabas, Grégory Gadebois, Andrea Waskovics, Hermina Fátyol, Konrad Quintus

László ‘Son of Saul’ Nemes’ third picture is a beautifully mounted but structurally unsure bildungsroman. A 1949 prologue sees four-year-old Jewish boy Andor reunited with his mother Klára (Waskovics). During the War, Klára had gone into hiding when her husband was sent to the camps. Jump to eight-years later where Klára and Andor (Barabas) are still struggling to make a connection, with Andor maintaining that the father he hardly knew will return home. Mother-son relations are frayed further when Klara takes up with Berend (Gabedois), a brutish Gentile butcher. As her mother spends more time with Berend, the nature of their relationship becomes clearer to Andor. Working again with cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, Nemes abandons the subjective formalism of his first two pictures where the focus remained on the characters amidst a blurred enigmatic background, in favour of something more conventional with Erdély locating a sepia-tinted richly detailed beauty in the dilapidated, often dangerous Budapest locales. Barabas is impressive as Andor even if his character remains underdeveloped. Gabedois is excellent as Berend with the French actor conveying the sadness beneath his character’s boorish exterior. Konrad Quintus provides rare moments of humour as a pompous and officious Stalinist true believer shopkeeper. The presence of Andor’s mother seems to suggest that the film’s title refers to the fact that it’s the country itself that has been abandoned, but any allegorical intent is blunted by a dramatic inertness and an overlong running time.

David Willoughby

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