István Szabó is more than just the most feted Hungarian film-maker of his generation. With a remarkable life and epic career that spans many of Europe’s darkest world-historical convulsions across the 20th century and beyond, the much-garlanded 85-year-old deserves major kudos for his long service as the cinematic conscience of his nation, even if the journey required him to make some tough ethical compromises along the way. Indeed, Szabó is probably the greatest living big-screen chronicler of Central Europe as a whole, a vast trauma zone still recovering from wave after wave of imperial collapse and totalitarian tragedy.
Szabó is attending Locarno Film Festival this week to receive an honorary Golden Leopard prize and introduce his most recent feature, Final Report (2020), a wry, elegiac, semi-autobiograophical reflection on creeping old age and political hypocrisy. This minor-key autumnal drama reunites the director with his friend and long-time collaborator Klaus Maria Brandauer, a potent Austro-Hungarian double act first forged more than 40 years on the majestic Oscar-winner Mephisto (1981), in which Brandauer plays an ambitious German stage actor whose moral compass is warped by his growing success during Hitler’s rise to power. “Vanity is the artist’s weakness,” the veteran director told Film Philosophy magazine in 2002, “it enables seduction.”
Even in his early directing days, Szabó was a forensic examiner of how people in repressive dictatorships, from ordinary citizens to famous artists, make their own tricky moral compromises with murderous regimes. One of his earliest stand-out films, the autobiographer coming-of-age drama Father (1966), casts a cynical eye on national myth-making in the wake of the bloody Hungarian uprising of 1956, which was brutally put down by the Soviet army. Earning the director his first Academy Award nomination, Confidence (1980) examines the fragile nature of love and trust in Nazi-occupied Hungary. For Szabó, fatherhood and fatherland are both emotionally stirring notions that require rigorous interrogation.
Szabó, who has distant Jewish ancestry and lost several relatives in the Holocaust, has returned to themes of antisemitism and Nazi collaboration many times, notably in the lavish period dramas Colonel Redl (1985), Hanussen (1988) and Taking Sides (2001). But often these historical dramas were thinly disguised allegories for the agonising double lives of Hungarians living under Communism. Moral complexity in difficult circumstances has always been central to Szabo’s vision. “Life is not a fairy tale like the ones you heard as a child,” he said in 2002. “You cannot decide between black and white because black and white doesn’t exist.”
Kudos is also due to Szabó for confidently navigating a new cinematic landscape following the collapse of Soviet Communism. With the decline of state-subsidised cinema in Eastern Europe, he launched a new international phase of his career with a series of mostly English-language dramas. He worked with Glenn Close on the backstage operatic farce Meeting Venus (1991), with an Oscar-nominated Annette Bening on Being Julia (2004), with Helen Mirren on sombre literary two-hander The Door (2012), and more. But his mid-career masterpiece is probably his most personal, directing triple versions of Ralph Feinnes in the richly novelistic, generation-spanning Hungarian family saga Sunshine (1999).
In a gripping late-career plot twist that echoes one if his key dramatic concerns, it emerged in 2006 that Szabó was recruited by Hungary’s Communist-era security services in his youth to inform on his fellow film and theatre school students. This was during the crackdown following the 1956 uprising, and was essentially an act of blackmail. “I was arrested with two school friends,” Szabó confessed to the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság. “We were questioned for three days and nights. Eventually I was forced to sign a statement saying I would work with the secret police.”
Kudos to Szabó for not trying to dodge or fudge these prickly issues when they came to light. Indeed, like one of his morally complex characters, he insists he made this Faustian pact for noble reasons, partly to help save the life of a classmate who had opposed Russian forces during the 1956 revolution. “The work for the secret police was the bravest and most fearless of my life,” he boldly claimed.
After facing criticism at home over these revelations, Szabó declined a lifetime achievement award from the Hungarian Film Academy. But to his credit, he seems to have survived this potentially damaging episode with his gilded international reputation largely intact. While some film-makers merely chronicle the darker chapters of history, Szabó lived through several of them, and has spent the last 60 years drawing painful wisdom from the experience. This is both his blessing and his burden. “I don’t think that you can separate art and politics,” he said in 2002, “because politics is life.”
The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.
