REFUGE ENGLAND (Robert Vas, 1959)

A Hungarian who fled Budapest for London after the 1956 uprising, Robert Vas soon after made Refuge England, which, fusing fictional and documentary elements, drew upon his own experience. The protagonist of this brilliant short is Tibor Molnar, a postwar Hungarian refugee. Molnar retraces his steps from his first day in London more than a decade earlier, before he knew more than a single English word. (That one word was refugee.) What we see is how things “actually” happened on that fictitious day. Molnar tries to locate the person at the address that had been written down for him at the refugee camp. Alas, this address is incomplete; there is a “Love Lane” in many diverse districts of London, and he has to ferret them all out from daylight to darkness. Along the way a few persons try to help, but a vast number of faces seem impersonal and oblivious, and Molnar feels hopelessly shut out of the life of a city whose noises are familiar but whose language he doesn’t understand. The last address he checks out proves to be the right one. The door opens; he is welcomed in.
     Gorgeously cinematographed in crisp black and white by Walter Lassally (a future Oscar winner for Zorba the Greek), Vas’s remarkable film combines Molnar’s fictional reconstruction (giving birth to the genre of pseudodocumentary?) with voiceover that stresses the immigrant’s original displacement, loneliness and being literally and emotionally lost. Silently Molnar re-enacts the past while voiceover “gives voice” to this past situation of his over which he has triumphed by learning English and finding his place in London.
     The film nearly opens by quoting an actual Hungarian immigrant, Làszlò Cs. Szabò: “Restore to me, last rock of refuge, England,/ Dignity that befits me as a man.”

A TALE OF SPRINGTIME (Eric Rohmer, 1989)

Not for the first or last time in a film written and directed by Eric Rohmer, there is matchmaking behind the scenes and romance in the air. Inaugurating a series on the four seasons, Conte de printemps is a profound, delightful Parisian comedy that sparkles with wit and human nature—and beauteous Nature in the country. Natache, an exuberant teenaged music student, tries to make things happen between Jeanne, a high school philosophy teacher she has just met at a party, and her father, Igor, an arts funding bureaucrat whose current young girlfriend, Eve, she just doesn’t like. Electra anyone? (Natache disparages her mother constantly.) Meanwhile, Jeanne has her own boyfriend, who happens to be out of town, as is Natache’s boyfriend, who happens to be her father’s age and has her father’s temperament. No one is as comfortable in her or his relationship as she or he seems; but no one is quick to budge from it, either.
     As usual with Rohmer, situations are complex because the characters are never entirely conscious of their own motivations or even certain of their feelings. We can be surprised at how surprised they find themselves in some of these situations. For instance, although Natache wants so that Jeanne dislike Eve, Jeanne finds common intellectual ground with this student of philosophy. Yes, Eve condescends to young Natache, but Natache is even more brutal to her, and there is no possible resolution of the matter of who started what with whom. And what about the necklace, a family heirloom, that Igor had intended to give his daughter on her eighteenth birthday but has somehow disappeared? Actually, that mystery more or less gets solved—only the solution is more convoluted with alternative possibilities than the original mystery was!