Down by Love (2003) Szerelemtöl sújtva

Director: Tamás Sas
Writers: Tamás Sas, Can Togay
Stars: Patricia Kovács, Gábor Máté, Józsa Hacser

Twenty-four-year-old Éva has lived for years in the flat left to her by her parents. The only meaning in her restricted life is her secret affair with Tibor, a forty-four-year-old married man. Éva’s parents died in a car accident while she was still a little girl. Friends of the family, Tibor and Klára, adopted the child. Tibor draws the adolescent girl into a relationship, and Éva finds herself in love with her adoptive father, becoming a slave to him in body and soul. Upon discovering the affair, Klára attempts to rid herself of Éva by sending her to an institution, but Tibor is unwilling to discontinue his secret relationship with the girl.
This state of affairs goes on for eleven years. There is no room in Éva’s life for anyone else but Tibor; she has no feelings of passion for any other man. Tibor then tells her that he will finally fulfil his promises to her by leaving Klára in order to begin a new life with Éva. Éva takes it upon herself to inform Klára - who she has not seen for years - of Tibor’s intention to divorce her. However, the meeting between the two women dashes all of Éva’s hopes when it transpires that Klára is heavily pregnant. Éva thinks of a desperate and insane plan.
The unusual plot of the film is told in an unusual way.
With great vigour a single actress manages to bring a feeling of desperate loneliness to her 90-minute performance.

Extremely intelligent drama about a very young woman and her middle-aged lover. The scene is an apartment for the whole movie, there is mostly only one person here, and the second human face is seen only at the end of the story. But the movie is not boring at all, the tension is greater and greater as the heroine fights with her past, with her dreams, with her absurd situation. This is a tragic movie about the love of a woman and about the total selfish attitude of a man, who has his wife, home, family – and wants to keep his young lover too.

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