The Inheritance (1980)
(Örökség/The Heiresses)
Country: HUN/FR
Technical: col 105m
Director: Márta Mészáros
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Lili Monori, Jan Nowicki
Synopsis:
In pre-war Hungary a wealthy but infertile heiress marries a soldier on the understanding that her best friend, a Jewess, will act as surrogate mother for their child. As the pregnancy progresses, however, amid growing anti-semitism in army circles, the girl increasingly takes on the role of lady of the house.
Review:
An awkward European co-production with more than one uncomfortable lurch in storytelling. Mészáros, as in Nine Months (1976), uses a pregnancy to shadow an evolving situation, but the external political turmoil is only vaguely adumbrated and the husband is an enigma: apparently of Jewish descent himself, he never seems concerned for his own jeopardy; his actual wife, who is clearly the character that most intrigues the director, is treated with contempt as a representative of the old order. Then there is his hobby of cinematography, which is a way of bringing exterior events into the home but does not seem to perform any other function. The 1944 epilogue leaves a number of questions unanswered, and by the time we come to the final freeze-frame we have become estranged from these ciphers.
(Örökség/The Heiresses)
Country: HUN/FR
Technical: col 105m
Director: Márta Mészáros
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Lili Monori, Jan Nowicki
Synopsis:
In pre-war Hungary a wealthy but infertile heiress marries a soldier on the understanding that her best friend, a Jewess, will act as surrogate mother for their child. As the pregnancy progresses, however, amid growing anti-semitism in army circles, the girl increasingly takes on the role of lady of the house.
Review:
An awkward European co-production with more than one uncomfortable lurch in storytelling. Mészáros, as in Nine Months (1976), uses a pregnancy to shadow an evolving situation, but the external political turmoil is only vaguely adumbrated and the husband is an enigma: apparently of Jewish descent himself, he never seems concerned for his own jeopardy; his actual wife, who is clearly the character that most intrigues the director, is treated with contempt as a representative of the old order. Then there is his hobby of cinematography, which is a way of bringing exterior events into the home but does not seem to perform any other function. The 1944 epilogue leaves a number of questions unanswered, and by the time we come to the final freeze-frame we have become estranged from these ciphers.
(Örökség/The Heiresses)
Country: HUN/FR
Technical: col 105m
Director: Márta Mészáros
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Lili Monori, Jan Nowicki
Synopsis:
In pre-war Hungary a wealthy but infertile heiress marries a soldier on the understanding that her best friend, a Jewess, will act as surrogate mother for their child. As the pregnancy progresses, however, amid growing anti-semitism in army circles, the girl increasingly takes on the role of lady of the house.
Review:
An awkward European co-production with more than one uncomfortable lurch in storytelling. Mészáros, as in Nine Months (1976), uses a pregnancy to shadow an evolving situation, but the external political turmoil is only vaguely adumbrated and the husband is an enigma: apparently of Jewish descent himself, he never seems concerned for his own jeopardy; his actual wife, who is clearly the character that most intrigues the director, is treated with contempt as a representative of the old order. Then there is his hobby of cinematography, which is a way of bringing exterior events into the home but does not seem to perform any other function. The 1944 epilogue leaves a number of questions unanswered, and by the time we come to the final freeze-frame we have become estranged from these ciphers.