Erzsébet Bori
Life and Literature
Sándor Sára: A vád (The Prosecution) • György Molnár: A rossz orvos
(The Bad Doctor) • Lívia Gyarmathy: Szökés (Escape)
[...]
Escape, the latest film by the filmmaking partnership of Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi, is a romantic historic adventure. In keeping with the period depicted, the costumes display a sober elegance and favour natural materials - rough canvas and foot rags. Two basic styles are cut: prisoners' garb and soldiers' uniform, the latter in a version with blue collar tabs. (The cut signifies the Soviet influence and the blue is that of the secret police).
The Gyarmathy–Böszörményi main theme is the fifties and the Recsk forced labour camp. They have already made a two-part documentary on it and had one of its famous residents, the poet György Faludy, talk about it. Even in an earlier Böszörményi film, Laura, rock guitarists strummed away in the quarry at Recsk. Their obsession is understandable: Böszörményi himself was a prisoner in the camp.
Not surprising then, they realized that a major (successful) escape story was lying unused in the Recsk chapter of recent Hungarian history. Escape does not just deal with a new portion of the story, which has already been told in different ways, but sticks to the rules of the escape genre in a full blooded feature film. Exactly as much is said as is strictly necessary about the circumstances, the harsh security, the camp's everyday life and the everyday horrors for the heroic enterprise to be appreciated. Gyula Molnár, (modelled on the actual protagonist, Gyula Michnai), comes from the Desmoulin family, which settled in Hungary and is well known to history. He is no tyro in the art of escape. Scars on his neck - the traces of the entry and exit points of a bullet - demonstrate his leanings to notoriety. This wound will also figure in the thorough plan to which Molnár devotes the cunning of a snake, the gentleness of a dove and the patience of an ox. His own behaviour is the height of play-acting, for he has to deceive his fellow prisoners (liberally dotted with informers) as well as the camp's governors and guards. The camp commandant himself (Gyula Bodrogi) is not an enemy. This Spanish civil war hero is now a pathetic alcoholic. His wife long ago left him, he is bringing up his children alone and the camp is effectively governed by a political officer (Daniel Olbrychski), inferior in rank but his superior in terms of power. What follows is the outwitting of this cunning and vicious ÁVH (secret police) officer, who operates according to the basic principle that you cannot trust people but you can rely on their cowardice and baseness. The hardest test is, that to go through with his plan, Molnár has himself looked on by his fellow inmates as an informer: they despise him, spit on him, play tricks on him.
György Faludy also remembers the escape in his autobiography, My Happy Days in Hell, translated into several languages, which appeared in English in 1962. Gyula Michnai - according to Faludy - was a pleasant young man, a graduate of a school for officers; his plan was brilliant. He carved a wooden machine gun in the carpentry workshop, substituting pieces of tin cans for the appropriate steel parts. On May 20th, a Sunday morning, in the tailoring and shoe-making workshop, where the ÁVH officers had their uniforms ironed and ordered extra boots for themselves made from the leather which was supposed to be for the repair of inmates boots, he dressed from head to toe in an ÁVH guard's uniform. Then, with his flat hat tilted down over his eyes, he drove seven friends in front of him to the fence gate. There he yelled to the soldier on duty to let them out. The commander of the shoe-making workshop, a sad faced, dark man, who was a bookseller in civilian life, got frightened and called back “I am not going!” - whereupon Michnai kicked him in the backside with all his might, so that he flew out in front of the barbed wire fence. With this gesture, Michnai dispelled all possible doubt. He marched out through the gate with his seven mates and disappeared into the depths of the forest. In a Hollywood production, the end titles and triumphant music would now follow. But for Molnár and his friends the worst is still to come. All they have done so far is to get out of the innermost circles of hell into a wider prison. No helicopter, car, secret bank account, buried treasure or intrepid heroine awaits them; nor can they turn to family or friends. Dictatorship is not only felt in the bleak outside world but also in people's souls and in their behaviour; more difficult than the simple and splendid escape is wrestling with the faint-heartendness, suspicion and stupidity of one's companions.
Géza Böszörményi and Gyula Maros have written a masterful script based on the true story of this Recsk escape, although the same cannot be said for the camerawork (Gábor Balogh), or the directing. There are some fine and powerful images there, as well as a few glaring false notes struck (such as a close-up filling the whole screen of two hands letting each other go), arty slow motion and freeze frames typical of bad action movies. The uplifting denouement is interrupted by the screaming of a second-rate rock star, whereupon the audience, completely disregarding the cathartic ending, leave the auditorium in a panic. Neither music and these images are appropriate to the period described or to the rather traditional style of narrating this Hungarian success story.
Although I have mentioned romantic adventure, Escape keeps historic accuracy in sight throughout (despite well fed actors making belief difficult in the dreadful starvation punishments). Gyula Molnár is not Barrymore putting the enemy to the sword all on his own, evading the state's entire police force, galloping to freedom on his magic steed. His companions fall out one by one, and without help from outside and an effective French connection, he would not have made it either. The film does not show, but Faludy tells us, that the effect of the successful escape was a long time coming. The world did not know, perhaps did not want to know, about Recsk. It took months for the CIA to check Michnai's assertions before he was finally given a Radio Free Europe microphone to recite the names he had learned by heart of the several hundred prisoners held at Recsk. Michnai's recitation of the roll call not only brought news to relatives of their loved ones who had disappeared without trace years before, but it also made the world aware of the existence of the Hungarian concentration camp.
If my hunch is right, Lívia Gyarmathy's film should do well on the international festival circuit. There are dozens of political thrillers and melodramas around which use a historic background. Taking a successful film like The Killing Fields, winner of three Oscars, as a benchmark, Escape stands out in its field.
Erzsébet Bori
is our regular film critic.
