Word: angie
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Angi Vera is a film of paradoxes. The setting-at least for Americans-is at once exotic and dismal. The heroine, Angi Vera, is a fierce mouse. The style is gentle, almost pensive, yet the tale told is near savage in its implications...
...place is Hungary in 1948, during the Communist takeover. Angi Vera (her surname is placed first, according to the custom of the country), a nurse's aide, publicly denounces inhumane and corrupt treatment-bourgeois backsliding, as it were-in the hospital where she works...
...that is not the way it works out. She turns out to be more grateful and more malleable than she is able to show. At one of those horrendous self-criticism sessions that were a feature of institutional life under Stalinism, little Angi Vera rises to denounce herself for her romantic weakness, which has the effect-another paradox here-of ending her lover's party career and enhancing her own. The film is written and directed with a kind of deadpan subtlety (perhaps the only way it could be done in a country that is, after all, Communist...
...That Angi Vera lingers so in one's mind is a tribute to the winsome playing of Veronika Papp in the title role. She retains one's sympathy even when she is at her most enigmatic, even when, finally, she appalls. But the highest praise must go to Writer-Director Gabor. His wonderfully searching eye brings alive all sorts of difficult scenes-awful school social events, boring classroom discussions, dormitory gossip sessions-grants them a waywardness and a resonance that are rare. The deft economy with which he characterizes his heroine's classmates, preventing them from being...