Sunday, July 17, 2011

Father (1966)

Father / Apa (1966) 
Father / Apa (1966)


Genre: Drama
Director: István Szabó
Starring: András Bálint, Miklós Gábor, Kati Sólyom, Klári Tolnay
Duration: 89 min.
Rating: 7.2

Summary:
After his father is killed in World War II, a young Hungarian boy named Tako concocts a fantasy image of the parent he never really knew.

Father / Apa (1966)


Father is a Hungarian film written and directed by István Szabó.  In 2000, it was voted as one of the Budapest 12 a list of the 12 best Hungarian films of the Twentieth Century.

Essentially a coming of age story told in two parts, the first half of this film is set in 1949 and deals with young Tako (Daniel Erdely) as a schoolboy whose father (Miklos Gabor), a doctor, died at the end of WW2.  Being too young to really remember his father, the boy invents and imagines stories about him, so he becomes a kind of mythological figure in his mind.  The second half of the film takes place in 1956 just before the Hungarian uprising, Tako (Andras Balint) is now an university student and a man who still struggles with the memories of his father and sets out to discover the man he really was.

A well made story, quite moving but never over-sentimental that excels particularly in the various imagined heroic flashback scenes of the father, with Miklos Gabor doing a fine job in that role.  Hungarian film legend Andras Balint plays the older Tako brilliantly as a young man searching for the truth about his past.  

Father / Apa (1966)

Father / Apa (1966)

Father / Apa (1966)

Father / Apa (1966)

Father / Apa (1966)

Father / Apa (1966)

Father / Apa (1966)

Father / Apa (1966)

2 comments:

shutterbug said...

not sure if I would watch this. it seems too slow for me. 

d_4 said...

It seems interesting enough. No oo's or ahh's, but seems like a decent watch. 

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