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"Ça Ira" is promptly heard, as befits the continuum of ambivalent revolution. The late Sixties by way of the late Forties, young communists dunk soldiers into a reservoir and extend an invitation to the dance. The People's College Federation, "standing firm in the line of fire," invading a Catholic academy to spread their own gospel. "We'll create space for a debate." Clad in crimson shirt, the head of the sloganeering students (Lajos Balázsovits) mingles with seminarians and confers amicably with a Jewish survivor (András Bálint). Singing and dancing are no longer enough for the militant gamine (Andrea Drahota), the road to persuasion comes to encompass banning books and punishing clerics. "The end justifies the means." "Careful... The wrong means can distort the aims." Miklós Jancsó's La Chinoise, a response to May '68 and the Prague Spring, a vision of festive hope for change that can easily darken into a reign of terror. The thrusts and parries of ideology, the collective dream so close, so far. New lyrics for "La Carmagnole," "bandiera rossa trionferà," Psalm 137 in Hebrew and Hungarian. Figures lined arm in arm or corralled punitively, cadres consolidated and divided. "Shall I teach you a new song?" A swirling camera throughout, keyed to restless youth in its vertiginous choreography, continuous movement and limited advancement. Red banner draped over iron crucifix and military jeep turned on its side, an investigation into the individual's role in history in which the police officer (András Kozák) emerges as the voice of reason. Purposely unresolved, it ends where it begins, the back of a radical's head in out-of-focus close-up. Hagmann's The Strawberry Statement takes up the campus uprising the following year. With Kati Kovács, József Madaras, and István Uri.
--- Fernando F. Croce |