At European film festival press confer- ences, in interviews with directors, in studio corridors, in conversations among producers, all that is currently being talked about is the lack of money for making films, and that the only way to prevent a whitewash by American movies is to allocate considerable financial resources, at the national as well as the European level, to cinematic workshops.
Hungary is in a unique position, insofar as the Hungarian commercial television channels launched six months ago are all legally obliged to give six per cent of their profits towards the production of Hungarian films, which means that considerable financial resources will be available in the near future. In the meantime, film- makers can either consider making low-budget movies or, if they are lucky, can work in foreign productions.
Károly Makk is among the lucky ones.
The rain is pouring down hard and there is mud everywhere. With her hair soaking wet and eyes baggy with fatigue, a beautiful young woman and her baby are shown on their way to a pawnshop; the year is 1870, and the location Baden-Baden. So opens Károly Makk's new film, a British-Dutch-Hungarian co-production, The Gambler, based on Dostoevsky's novel. This is the first—partly—Hungarian film for a very long time that has some chance of being successful in Europe. The reasons are to be found in the director's earlier international success and, but even more, in the rebirth of British costume films—and that genre's abiding popularity.
It is always rewarding to adapt a classic to the big screen. Whatever angle the director might be able to find, and no matter how far he wanders off from the known facts and the canonized interpretations, his work is guaranteed to create more of a stir than it would had he tried to take his viewers into an unknown world of his own creation. This especially applies to films about writers and/or great literary works. Scripts based on clichés are usually doomed to failure. Agneska Holland's movie about Rimbaud and Verlaine, Total Eclipse, or Richard Attenborough's most recent Hemingway adaptation, In Love and War for example, were far from satisfactory. In contrast, an approach which tries to weave the process of creation, the art and circumstances of the birth of a concrete literary work into a portrait of the artist, always provides a stimulating intellectual challenge.
Makk chose the latter course.
Although The Gambler is the film version of the novel of the same title, the film is primarily about its author. In 1866, the period in question, Dostoevsky was one of Russia's best-known writers; he was also deeply in debt, lonely and ill, and was in danger of failing to meet his agreement to deliver a hundred-and-sixty-page-long novel in thirty days to his publisher. In breach of this obligation, he would have been obliged to forfeit all rights to his artistic output, past and future, in favour of that literary pawnbroker. Harried by creditors and exploited by his own destitute relatives, the writer asked a stenographer, Anna, to move into his apartment and take down in shorthand, working night and day, the story he dictated set in an imaginary Rulettenburg.
Imagination and reality fade into one another imperceptibly in the film, which has numerous story lines and jumps back and forth in time: characters in the fiction reveal the author's biographical details, while Polina, who is patterned on a disgraced woman, visits the writer in one of the scenes; the most absorbing strand shows the emerging relationship between the author and Anna.
Because this young woman becomes a witness, and after a while the catalyst, of the novel's birth; falling asleep by the ink-pot on the table, she dreams herself into the role of the main characters of the story taking place in that Mecca of gambling, irresistibly drawn into the world of the novel; the fact that the impossible was achieved—the novel was completed on time—was largely owing to her resolution, strength and curiosity.
The child carried to the gambling parlour from the pawnshop in the opening scene by that beautiful and poor young woman (who, four years after the completion of the novel, went by the name of Anna Grigorievna Dostoevskaya) was conceived from this unique human relationship, while the roulette-playing father was the aging, limping and overweight writer himself.
Károly Makk, now seventy-three, has directed a pleasant, tightly composed and finely acted movie. Even if it will not improve the foreign standing of Hungarian films, it will provide a clear message to the outside world: Hungarian movie makers can compete with the rest of the field, and can still hold their own on the international market, provided they can work under normal conditions.

[..]