Te
Hungary, 1962, black and white, 10 mins
One of the first films by one of Hungary’s greatest contemporary directors, You… is a delightful jeu d’ésprit with a distinctly French nouvelle vague flavour: in particular, it’s strongly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme Mariée (1964), though Szabó’s film was made a couple of years earlier. The second person singular title refers to an unnamed woman (an early screen appearance by prolific actress Cecília Esztergályos), who’s first shown conversing with an unseen lover who rebuffs her request to draw a picture of her because it’s impossible to capture her in motion – something the film goes on to do to perfection.
Indeed, much of it is a study of movement: an early montage shows the woman sashaying down the street, eating an ice cream, wiping a spillage off her left breast and glancing coquettishly at a group of young men. Szabó sometimes resorts to slow motion to study her gestures, whether tossing rubbish into a bin or reading a newspaper. She looks up into the sky with a telescope, then downwards from a high balcony. She runs down several flights of steps, the horizontal stripes in her top contrasting with the vertical bars of the railings, almost like the calibration marks on an Eadwaerd Muybridge study. She traverses zebra crossings repeatedly, a quickening montage making the routine seem increasingly perilous.
Back with her lover, she proposes ringing doorbells and ordering the respondents to “fall in love!”, just to see what happens. An open window looks into a dentist’s surgery and she feels a twinge in her teeth. She weighs herself, and examines her snub nose in the machine’s mirror, prior to admiring herself in assorted shop windows. A witty cutaway to a biology textbooks reminds us that “the brain controls all human activities”, and she holds her head in her hands as though it’s become unexpectedly fragile prior to speculating what she’d find were she to journey into her lover’s mind. (“Just how much I love you”, he disingenuously claims). Finally, she buys a bottle of milk and swigs from it on a street corner, accompanied by several people doing the same thing.
One shouldn’t make any great claims for You…: it’s essentially a lighthearted romp by a director whose career still lay ahead of him. But its quicksilver visual wit (much of the film is dialogue-free, underscored by an elegant piano trio) also shows that Szabó was well on the way to mastering his medium even at this early stage.
- Director: István Szabó
- Screenplay: István Szabó, Tamás Vámos
- Photography: Tamás Vámos
- Producer: András Nemeth
- Cast: Cecília Esztergályos
- Production Company: Béla Balázs Studio
Links
- The Béla Balázs Studio website entry includes credits and stills, but sadly no video.
- Internet Movie Database