István Szabó (Budapest, 1938) is surely the most acclaimed and best known Hungarian filmmaker. After he graduated from the University of Theatre and Films in Budapest, he studied at the prestigious Béla Balázs Studio, at the time when new film movements were emerging in Europe. After working on several short films, he made The Age of Illusions (Álmodozásek kora, 1965), Father (Apa, 1966) and LoveFilm (Szerelmesfilm, 1970), an unacknowledged trilogy with autobiographical undertones, in which their young main characters rebel against a reality that they reject; where the influence of François Truffaut, above all, can be felt; and the director is striving for direct cinema, which tries to move away from socialist realism.
His filmmaking shifted radically with Mephisto (Mephisto, 1981), a new take on the myth of Faustus, based on the novel by Klaus Mann, in which a Nazi leader, modelled in Hermann Göring, plays Mephistopheles and entices the actor Hendrik Höfgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) to collaborate with a regime that is beginning to seize power in the Germany of the early 1930s. Höfgen helps the Nazi purges in exchange for becoming the leading actor of the official theatre and the director of the state theatre. Szabó changed his aesthetic register to create a film with classical undertones and an undeniable stylistic brilliance, something that was well within the remit of his regular Director of Photography, Lajos Koltai. Mephisto won the Oscar for the best foreign film and, among other accolades, the prize for the best script at the Cannes Festival; and Szabó achieved international acclaim.
In 1984, he made Colonel Redl (Redl ezredes), an adaptation of A Patriot of Me by John Osborne. The officer of the title, played again by Brandauer, experiences a meteoric military rise through the ranks, thanks to his unwavering loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian army of Emperor Franz Joseph and to his role as an informer for the Empire. The plot parallelism between the two titles is obvious, along with the search for a formal perfectionism, which would become the hallmark of his successive productions, at the same time as he turned away from his own original screenplays to adapt pre-existing works.
Even though he never left Hungary in one way or another, his filmmaking expanded globally. Thus, in 1991, he directed Glenn Close in Meeting with Venus, a British-Japanese-US co-production. In 1999, in Sunshine, whose accolades include the Golden Globe for the Best Film, he created a fresco of the history in Hungary in three stages. It follows a Jewish family who make their fortune in the early 20th century during World War I, suffer the Nazi repression during World War II, and ends up collaborating to uncover an alleged Jewish plot within the Red Army. Ralph Fiennes plays characters from the three generations. Yet again, betrayal, treason.
In 2004, his lead female character (Annette Bening) in Being Julia was nominated for the Oscar for the Best Actress. In 2012, his gallery of outstanding performance was bolstered by the excellent work of Helen Mirren in the disturbing The Door, with which he returned to the Hungarian film festival. His latest film up to now is Final Report (Zárójelentés, 2020), a criticism of the current situation in Hungary – this time focused on health – and in which Brandauer stars again.
Jesús Angulo
