It’s August 12, 1945 and the sun beats down on the Hungarian countryside, baking the roads and frying the dirt into a fine, drifting powder. In the village, the wealthy town clerk Szentes István finishes the final preparations for his son Arpad’s wedding. One by one guests, musicians, and elderly veterans from old wars arrive to gobble up plates of sausages and glasses of schnapps. About the town are Russian troops, mere teenagers already softened from the horrors of war by the stultifying boredom of occupancy. At the train station, an officer checks the luggage of two tired men, one wizened and gray, the other compacted by the sternness of a too early adulthood. They carry with them boxes and boxes of perfume they insist on bringing with them to István’s village. The carriage driver offers them a ride, but they insist on walking through the drowsy heat. The soldier at the station seems puzzled, amused. What are two Jews doing out here? Weren’t all the local ones “deported” a year or two ago? And why are they bringing such lavish goods to a village that couldn’t possibly afford them? Weren’t Jews supposed to be clever, scheming businessmen? But the soldier can’t know the burdens the father and son carry with them as they continue their weary way along the road. Their secrets are terrible ones, ones that will see the wedding ruined, much of the town set ablaze, and the fragile, constructed lives of the townspeople shattered to pieces.
Based on the short story “Homecoming” by Gábor T. Szántó, Ferenc Török’s 1945 examines a side of the Holocaust seldom addressed in fiction—the return of Jewish survivors to regions where they were exterminated en masse by the Nazis. What is it like returning to a communal home without a community? How do you face the locals who, at best, stood by and watched the slaughter of their friends and family or, at worst, actively aided the Germans? How can you lay claim to old property when it has been seized by the government and redistributed to new owners who’ve now lived there for years?
Yet Török turns his camera almost exclusively on the villagers, more interested in how their complacency falls apart when confronted with their past sins. The arrival of the Jews throws them into a frenzy of anguished guilt. Nobody takes it harder than István (Péter Rudolf) who became the village’s de facto leader after growing rich on their stolen property. Now that two have returned, he sees his control and influence slipping away. If these two survived the Nazis, could others have? Are they just the first two to come back? Will they demand all their possessions back? What will become of him if they succeed and leave him penniless?
1945 is a sparse and quiet film, more interested in evoking the punishing mood of existential chaos drowning the village than in bold character moments or confrontations. In this way Török echoes the cinema of fellow Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, in particular his seven and a half hour masterpiece Sátántangó (1994) which also follows the crumbling apart of a small village when one of their number who’d been presumed dead suddenly returns. Török’s villagers act as if the guiding principles in their lives have vanished. People seem to stumble and wander their way through alleys and backstreets, into and out of bars. Arpad (Bence Tasnádi) calls off the marriage and threatens to immigrate to Paris or America. His fiancée seduces a local Communist. A farmer downs half a bottle of schnapps and hangs himself. And all this madness takes place before the Jews have even stepped foot in their village.
It’s only slowly revealed what the Jews are actually doing in the village. Although we get a vague sense of what it is, we never get as concrete an answer as Szántó provides in his short story. This might be the film’s only failing, as the climactic reveal of what the Jews have in those boxes—and no, it’s not corpses—and what they intend to do with them sears the mind like a hot iron. But 1945 is all about questions and apprehensions, not answers and catharses. The villagers are still lost when the credits roll. As it should be. Seventy years after the Holocaust, the world still seems in shock. We’re still trying to figure out how it happened. And we may never.
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